


The Song Remembered

by Unforgotten



Category: Captain America (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brainwashing, Childhood Friends, Crossover, Five Times, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Memory Loss, My Auction Fics, Reunions, Separations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:21:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28686285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: The first person Bucky meets in Narnia seems pretty rude, and goes on to stab him for no good reason.It probably shouldn't be the start of a beautiful friendship, but there you have it.(Or: Five times Bucky and Loki meet in Narnia.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Loki
Comments: 21
Kudos: 33





	1. An Empty House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



> Written for aurilly for [Equality Auction](https://equalityauction.dreamwidth.org/). Thanks so much for your generous donation, and for the great fic idea! <3333

There once was a boy named Bucky Barnes, who lived in the best city in the world. He had never been anywhere else, nor ever really wanted to be, up until a sunny morning in late April. He was walking along the sidewalk, minding his own business, when suddenly he was somewhere else, instead. 

Wherever he was, it was very dark and quiet--so dark and so quiet that if you had tried to decide whether it was more dark than it was quiet or more quiet than it was dark, you would never have been able to make up your mind without changing it again a second later.

For a minute, Bucky thought what anyone would have: That someone had left a manhole open, and he'd fallen into the sewer. But the problems with this were obvious. When he looked up, there was no light coming in from the street. When he called out for help, there was no answer. He also had the feeling that if he had been in the sewer, his voice should have made an echo; but although he had shouted at the top of his lungs, the shout seemed to fade even more quickly than a whisper would have.

And besides all that, he hadn't even felt himself fall anywhere. So he must not have, after all.

Another boy might have panicked at this point--but Bucky was not prone to worry or stress, and certainly not to panic. He was the sort of boy who took things as they came, at least up to a point. And as weird as this was, it didn't seem to be such a terrible thing. Since he hadn't fallen he wasn't hurt, since he'd just had his breakfast he was neither hungry nor thirsty, and since he was now somewhere else then no one could blame him for failing to arrive at Miss Miller's classroom (for of course he had been on his way to school before this). So instead of doing something foolish, such as crying, yelling himself hoarse, or setting off running in a random direction, he took a minute to take stock of his surroundings.

Not being able to hear anything except his own breathing or see anything at all didn't mean he couldn't explore, Bucky figured. He bent down and felt the ground he was standing on. It was no more dry than it was wet, no harder than it was soft. It wasn't concrete or dirt or asphalt or grass. For a moment, the word 'clay' came into his mind, but as it didn't seem to be much like any of the clay he'd ever seen, he soon forgot it.

He stood back up and began to shuffle forward, taking very small steps so he wouldn't trip over anything, and waving his hands in front of himself so his face wouldn't run into any walls. This was not a very satisfying way of exploring a place, for he had no idea of where he was going, and even less of whether he was going in a straight line. Later, he would think that it had been much like playing pin the tail on the donkey, without the donkey or the pin or the friends all around you, and where you couldn't take the blindfold off when the game was over.

For a while, Bucky wasn't even sure whether he had his eyes open or not. In reality, he must have been straining them all the while, for he saw the light the moment it winked into existence. One second it wasn't there, and the next it was. It looked like the flame of a candle, except that instead of being orange or yellow or even blue, it was green. It might have been a large flame very far away, or a small flame much nearer; there was no way there in the dark to tell the difference.

As soon as he saw it, Bucky headed that way. As the ground up until now had been completely flat, he was confident enough to walk briskly, though not quite confident enough to run. Before long, he had come close enough to the flame to discover that it was a small flame after all, being held aloft by a boy about his own age.

"Who goes there? Announce yourself or face the wrath of Loki," said the boy when Bucky got even closer. By now, Bucky could see that he held a knife in his other hand, which was shaking a little.

"I'm Bucky," Bucky said.

He was close enough now that when the boy raised the hand with the candle flame in it, the light glanced off Bucky's face.

The boy peered at him for a long moment, then seemed to relax. The knife disappeared, and he said, "I am Loki Odinson."

"Pleased to meet you, Loki," Bucky said, and made to shake hands, except then Loki stared at him like he was nuts and so he put his hands in his pockets instead.

"I _said,_ I am Loki _Odinson_ ," Loki repeated, still staring. 

"Yeah, I got that the first time."

"I am a _Prince of Asgard_."

"Never heard of it," said Bucky, who wasn't unaware of the snotty tone in Loki's voice or the nasty way he was starting to scowl, but had already figured being the only two people around was more of a consideration than whether or not Loki was kind of snobby, and so he may as well make nice. "What's it like being a prince?"

He also figured asking Loki about it would help, since he seemed to care so much and people liked talking about themselves anyway. But Loki just stared at him some more. 

"It's--all right," he said finally, looking Bucky up and down. "What's it like being a peasant?"

Bucky had no real idea what that meant, but figured he may as well go with it if he was going to get the important questions. "It's good. So, do you know how we got here?"

"Of course," Loki said, brightening, and launched into an explanation that would have been almost as surprising as the brightening if Bucky had understood it. But as it was, he didn't really get much out of it except that Loki had been doing something he shouldn't have, which he'd found out about in a book he had no business reading, which was only one of the things he'd stolen in order to figure out how to do whatever the thing was.

"Okay," Bucky said when Loki had slowed down enough for him to get a word in. "So, uh, do you know where we are?"

"I was attempting to determine that when you interrupted my meditations," Loki said, stiffly enough for Bucky to guess that that meant he didn't know, either.

"Oh. Well, how do we get back home?"

"--I'll know more once I've made my determination." Loki said this even more stiffly.

"Okay," Bucky said, though what he was thinking was that Loki sure did seem to be wound tight. "So, how are you doing that thing?"

"What thing?"

"With the fire." For as soon as he'd gotten close, Bucky had noticed that the green flame Loki was holding wasn't part of a candle, or part of anything. It was hovering above his palm, seemingly all by itself.

"This? Any child can conjure flame."

*

"You're fantastic," Loki said an hour or two later, after Bucky had done the exact steps Loki had told him to seven or eight times, only for nothing at all to happen. "I've never met anyone with such an ineptitude. Then again, I suppose I've never had a peasant at any of my lessons..."

"Thanks a lot," Bucky said, for all boys are prone to disappointment, and his at not being able to do Loki's trick was very great. "I appreciate you rubbing it in."

"That was not my intention," Loki said, stiffly again--though it seemed like a different kind of stiffly than before. "I'm certain you have other qualities." 

Really, he ought to have said he was certain Bucky had _many_ other _fine_ qualities. If his mother had been present, she would surely have corrected him. Fortunately, Bucky really wasn't the sort of boy to wallow for very long, especially when it had turned out that there was such a thing as real magic in the world.

"What else can you do?" he asked, guessing that if the trick with the fire wasn't supposed to be hard, that must mean Loki had something better waiting in the wings. He'd already guessed that whatever Loki had been trying to do before he'd come here must have had something to do with some kind of magic spell.

Loki brightened again, and went into another long-winded explanation of the different kinds of magic. Bucky understood some of it, but only when Loki slowed down enough to explain anything in plain English. But the parts he didn't understand didn't really matter, because Loki gave demonstrations of everything he could do (or at least, everything that could be done in the literal middle of nowhere with almost no supplies).

Loki was just showing Bucky what he meant when he talked about illusion magic when all five Lokis froze, then tilted their heads. "Do you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

The extra Lokis disappeared, and it turned out the real one had been standing several Lokis to the right of the Loki Bucky had thought for sure he was. "Surely you must feel _something_. I'm certain it's calling both of us."

"What is?"

"You really feel nothing?"

Bucky shook his head.

"You're even more inept than I thought," Loki said, which was the kind of statement that would have raised even Bucky's hackles if everything else that was going on hadn't been too distracting for him to get sidetracked by asking Loki who the hell he thought he was talking to, anyway.

"What is it?" Bucky asked. "You can't just say things like that without explaining."

For a second, Loki looked like he was tempted to try. Then he said, "It's a magical signature. Many magical artifacts radiate an energy, of sorts. Whatever this one is, it's very--loud."

"I can't hear anything."

"You wouldn't _hear_ it, precisely. Not with your ears." Loki shot him a questioning look, to which Bucky shrugged. "Still no? Well, never mind. Come on."

So saying, Loki started walking. After a second, Bucky followed. "How far away do you think it is?"

"There's no telling. We might be walking for ten minutes, or ten years."

"Hopefully not that long," Bucky said. "I didn't bring anything to eat."

He'd had his lunch pail when he set out this morning, but didn't anymore. Maybe he'd dropped it in the dark without noticing, or maybe he'd dropped it in the street. Whatever had happened, his sandwich and his apple were long gone.

*

It turned out not to be ten hours. It turned out not to even be ten minutes before Loki, who'd been muttering to himself the whole time, suddenly said, "We must be nearly there." He paused, in both his steps and his words, then added, "I've never felt magic quite like this before."

"Is that good or bad?"

"It's--different," Loki hedged. "And it's--newer, I think, than the sort of magic I'm used to."

"Yeah, and?"

"I _think_ it means this world is new as well." Loki must have seen Bucky's puzzled look, for then he added, "New, rather than deserted. Like it's an empty house no one has yet lived in."

As examples went, this one was a lot better than some of his others, in that not only did it turn out to be completely accurate, but Bucky understood it right away.

"Oh, okay," Bucky said, and spent the next few minutes of their walk toward whatever-it-was thinking about that. If a world could be like a house, then did that mean someone had built it? Were people going to move in soon? How long had it been empty for, anyway? The darkness and silence all around seemed to hold something else now. Possibilities, bigger and brighter than any Bucky had ever heard of before. Who knew what kinds of things could fill up an entire world?

That was still the feeling he was having when Loki said, "Here."

A second later, Bucky saw something, right at the edge of the light from Loki's flame. At first it could have been anything, or maybe his eyes had gotten scrambled from not seeing anything other than Loki for so long. But as they got closer, something settled, either the image of the object or the object itself, and Bucky saw that it was a table.

It was made out of stone, and had strange writing all over it, gouged into the surface in letters Bucky couldn't make out. Later, he would learn that such letters were called runes. For now, all he knew was that they weren't in English, so he couldn't read whatever they said--but somehow, he wasn't surprised when he looked over and saw that Loki was squinting at the writing and moving his lips silently, like he could.

"What's it say?" Bucky asked, what seemed like a long time after he'd wanted to; up until then he'd had the strangest feeling, like he wasn't supposed to interrupt. "Can you tell?"

"More or less," said Loki, not stiffly this time, but instead seeming very intent on the task in front of him. He proceeded to read out loud, though very slowly; he didn't stumble over the words, as an inept reader might have, but took his time with them in the way of a very good reader who has nevertheless picked up a book containing a number of previously unknown words. When he saw Bucky didn't understand any of the gibberish coming out of his mouth, he summarized: "It's meant to be a sort of protective magic. Or--preventative? It's meant to stop something from happening. Or--apply limits to it? Something along those lines. But it hasn't been activated. It needs..." he squinted at it some more, lips moving. "Oh, that's simple enough."

"What is?" Bucky asked, not yet knowing Loki well enough to hear the sly note that had come into his voice, the one that said he'd either left out quite a lot from his summary, or just happened not to mention the most important detail or two.

"Come here," Loki said. "And hold out your hand over the table. No, palm-up."

Bucky did what he was told. Later, he was never sure what he'd thought Loki had meant to do, or why he'd gone along with it without at least asking a few questions first. 

Whatever he'd thought, what Loki actually did was grab Bucky's forearm in one hand, and bring out a small, shining knife with the other. The green flame was now floating on its own, somewhere in the air above their heads, lighting up everything that was happening. 

Then, before Bucky could make sense of it, or wrap his mind around whatever Loki might be planning to do, or why there was a knife involved now, Loki had slashed quit deeply into Bucky's palm.

"Ow!" Bucky said, followed by a few exclamations that would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap, had his mother ever heard him say them. "What'd you do that for?!"

But Loki hardly seemed to be listening. He held Bucky's arm in an iron grip Bucky couldn't break no matter how hard he struggled, or how hard he hit or kicked at Loki, and watched Bucky's blood drip onto the table. Still struggling, Bucky looked, too. It seemed like there was more blood than there should have been. It shone blackly in the green light, pooling in one place and seeping into a crevice in another.

Eventually, Loki let go of him. This didn't seem to have anything to do with Bucky repeatedly hitting or kicking him; it was more like Bucky had suddenly become unimportant. Loki didn't even seem to notice as Bucky took a big step back, and then a couple more for good measure.

"Ah," Loki said, leaning over the table to squint at the runes some more. He wiped the knife on his robes, then stuck his own hand out in the air. Bucky had just figured out what he was going to do when Loki slashed across his own palm with a low, pained hiss. "Look," he muttered. 

Bucky looked at the mess on top of the table, not because he wanted to so much as because he felt like he was supposed to, which had nothing to do with Loki telling him to. It was impossible to tell whose blood was whose; it was all mixed up together by now. It made Bucky's stomach turn to think about how red it all would have been in another light. The runes swam in front of his eyes, and at first he thought he was getting light-headed, too. Then he realized he wasn't, and that the runes really were writhing and changing, right in front of his eyes. And then, just as they went still again, the stone seemed to absorb their blood, until every drop of it had disappeared. There wasn't even a stain left.

"Hmmm," Loki said. "It says you're an innocent. Whatever that means. And that I'm--that can't be right."

"What?" Bucky said, despite himself.

"It says I'm a traitor. Which makes no sense." Loki glared at the table, like maybe the runes would change shape again if he made enough of a face at them. "Is it because I stabbed Thor?"

This question didn't seem to be aimed at Bucky, and so he didn't have to figure out what the answer should be. "Who's Thor?"

"My brother," Loki said, looking annoyed.

"Do you go around stabbing everyone you know?"

"I did not _stab_ you."

"Oh, yeah? Then what am I bleeding for?"

"You are being such an infant about it," Loki said crossly. He made like he was going to grab Bucky's arm again, and so Bucky took another big step back. He was far enough away now to get a good look at what was in front of him: A crazy magician boy from another world, and a blood-absorbing magic table, and who knew what else was going to happen if he stuck around.

No, thank you, he decided, and turned around and started walking away.

"Where are you going?" Loki called after him. "Bucky?"

Bucky just shook his head, and kept walking.

*

"Hey," Bucky said.

"You're back," Loki said. He was sitting on the edge of the table, and had been slumped over, staring at the big cut on his hand, or maybe at the nothing quality of the ground. Now he sat up straight, and smiled widely for just a second before it turned into a really fake-looking frown. "Not that I care, of course."

"Sure," Bucky said. It hadn't taken long for him to realize how much he didn't want to be in the dark alone. It had been fine before there was another option, but somehow it wasn't anymore. And anyway, the bleeding had stopped pretty quick in the end, even if his hand still hurt like the dickens. "You can't stab me again, though. I won't come back next time."

The knife was laying on the table. Bucky grabbed it and stuffed it into his pocket on his way over. Loki opened his mouth like he was going to say something about it, then shut it again. Then, when Bucky had hopped up on the table to sit next to him, he gave him a cautious, sidelong look, then said, "It was not a _stabbing_. It was a bleeding. There was a magical purpose to it."

"I don't care," Bucky said, though secretly he did, a little--or at least it seemed like it should matter that Loki had had a reason for it instead of slicing into him just for fun.

Either Loki figured that out, or he was just going to talk about it no matter what Bucky wanted, because he said, "It desired the blood of a traitor and an innocent so it would know the difference. Now it will."

"What does it need to know that for?" Bucky asked.

"I hardly know. This particular artifact seems somewhat reticent."

"What?"

"It is not forthcoming with its secrets."

"Maybe you should stop asking, then," Bucky said. 

*

"What's it like, having a brother?" Bucky asked, a few hours later. By then, they'd made a couple tries at more exploring--but no matter what direction they'd gone in, they hadn't found anything other than more flat nothing, and so now they were taking a break back at the table.

Loki sighed, like this was more exhausting as a subject than walking around in such an empty place could possibly be. "Tedious. I wouldn't recommend it."

"How come?"

Maybe Loki had been just waiting for a chance to go off, or maybe he hadn't. But go off was what he did. Having a brother was awful. He got all of the attention and all of the praise, none of it deserved. He never left Loki alone when he wished to be alone, and was always missing when Loki actually required him. But there was a lot of stuff around the edges of the complaining, and the stuff around the edges was what Bucky latched onto. The adventures Loki and his brother had had together; the way that when push came to shove, he always have at least one person on his side.

"That sounds swell," he said, when Loki had finished talking.

"I feel you may not have been paying attention, if that's what you think," said Loki, though he didn't sound as cross as he had when he had gotten started. Bucky guessed all the venting must have made him feel better (but did not guess how rare a thing it was, for the younger prince to have the chance to vent about his brother without secretly suspecting the vent-ee preferred him).

"All I've got is a sister," said Bucky, who had no idea he was to gain a brother in a fight in a back alley somewhere in Brooklyn, just a couple weeks into the coming summer. "And she's still little."

"What's that like?" Loki asked, a little awkwardly, the way he seemed to ask most questions, like he wasn't used to asking people about themselves, or else wasn't used to making friends.

And so Bucky got to talk for a while on the subject of sisters, and how loud they were, and how much they smelled, not to mention how much they cried, especially at night; and, when he started to feel a little disloyal, how they weren't all that bad, really, as long as they belonged to you and your parents and weren't someone else's baby a door or two down.

"That sounds dreadful," said Loki, with feeling.

"I guess."

It was then that they heard a sound, and both boys jumped nearly out of their skins. It had not been a particularly threatening sound, but of course they had gotten used to the idea of being totally alone in the world. If you have ever worn earplugs for an hour and then taken them out, you will understand how something that was actually very quiet could seem to them to be quite loud and jarring. 

"Hello?" Bucky said.

"Who goes there?" Loki demanded, bringing out another knife.

Feeling somewhat betrayed by the idea that Loki could have stabbed him again at literally any time, Bucky said, "How many of those do you have on you, anyway?"

"Three more daggers and six throwing knives," Loki said, so quickly and glibly that Bucky got the idea he was asked that question a lot, and probably never answered it honestly. "Listen."

There had been no answer from who or whatever was making the sound. As for the sound itself, it almost had to be footsteps. They weren't scraping steps, like the ones Loki must have heard when Bucky had been walking toward him. They were closer to padding steps, like when your mother tip-toes into your room long after bedtime in order to kiss your forehead and pull your blanket up under your chin.

The steps came closer, and closer still. The close they got, the more Bucky thought it must be two people, instead of one. Or maybe it wasn't a person at all.

"Does it sound like it could be some kind of animal to you?" he asked.

Loki seemed to think so. "Who knows what beast might populate such a realm? It must never have had so magnificent a meal as a son of Odin." He paused, and then added, "Or a magic-less peasant from a magic-less world. You're probably a very rare delicacy."

"It's not going to eat us." Bucky was almost entirely certain of this. He could not have said why, or explained what about the sound had given him that impression. It was just something he knew, as you know the sun will rise tomorrow (except that there is perhaps a part of you that knows the sun will someday burn out--and that if it is set to happen someday, then what is to stop it from doing so sooner? There are things that are safe and there are things that are not going to harm you right now, and though Bucky would have had difficulty expressing the distinction, his certainty nonetheless fell into the second category).

"Let's go," Loki said, hopping off the table and bringing out a smaller knife that must have been one of the throwing ones. "Perhaps we can outrun it."

"There's no way," Bucky said. They'd already heard the sound from three sides, like it was circling them. "It's got to be a lot faster than us."

Loki sighed, and leaned back against the table. "Then I suppose the plan must be to attack, and die with glory. I always enjoy that one."

A moment later, there came another sigh. It came from the fourth direction (which was to the east, though neither of them could have known it). It was strong enough to ruffle their hair and clothes, and soft enough that they almost had to strain to hear it. And after the sigh, there came a voice, almost as quiet as the sigh had been:

"Boys, boys," it said. "What are you doing here, in what is to be my land of Narnia?"

"We," Loki said. "Um."

Even in the greenness of the light, Bucky could see how pale he'd gotten, and that there was no chance he was going to be able to tell the story about the spell he'd been trying to do, back in his own world. For a second, Bucky figured it was going to be up to him to tell it. But that was only for a second, because as soon as he'd made up his mind to do it, he suddenly knew something. How he knew it, he wasn't sure. But he also knew the voice's owner was waiting. Someone had to give an answer, whether it was a good one or not.

"I don't know," Bucky said. "I don't think Loki does either. He was telling me about this spell he was trying to do before he got here, but I think maybe that was just some kind of a coincidence."

There was no answer, so he kept going, spurred on by the sudden desire to be really, truly, fully honest:

"We got blood on your table. It's gone now, though. We didn't mean to hurt anything." The voice still didn't say anything. "We're really sorry."

Now there came a laugh, deep and soft, low and loud, amused and sorrowful all at once. Then, the person he was talking to stepped into the light, which seemed brighter and yellower than it had before. Only it turned out not to be a person, exactly. It was a Lion, bigger and wilder and somehow realer than the one Bucky had once seen at the zoo.

"You would not have been permitted to do any harm," said the Lion. "In fact, you have done a great good (though you, Loki, should have taken nothing from Bucky that was not freely given)."

"--I apologize," Loki said, and though his hands were gripping his knives so tightly that his knuckles were white, it could not have been clearer that he was definitely not going to attack anything.

"It's okay," Bucky said, and found that it really was.

"It is nearly time for the first Day to begin," said the Lion, shaking his mane. "And thus past time you were returned to your own world."

"What, already?" said Loki, looking and sounding so crestfallen it would have surprised Bucky if he hadn't felt the same way from out of the blue.

"There will be other times," said the Lion, who was looking at them with an expression that was as full of sorrow as it was of joy--and that was knowing, too, as if he were seeing every great and terrible thing that had ever happened to them, or ever would. "This has been only your first visit here. Now, go--"

The word 'go' seemed to last a very long time indeed. And just as it began to fade, there seemed to be something else behind it. For a moment, Bucky thought he heard the beginning of a song, haunting and beautiful and new. But it was only for a second, and only for a note or two. Then it was gone, and he was somewhere else, standing once again in the middle of the sidewalk with his lunch pail in his hand. 

For a second, the light seemed too bright, and everything around too loud and busy. Bucky looked around, for any sign of the Lion, or the table, or even Loki, but there was nothing to see except everything he always saw on his way to school.

"Don't just stand there, kid," someone said, as people walked by him on either side.

That was enough to get Bucky moving, though it took the better part of an hour for him to blink away the memory of that other place, and to really believe he was back in Brooklyn. Luckily, he didn't have to apologize for being late to school, mostly because he turned out not to be late at all. No one else seemed to notice he'd been gone for hours, any more than the clock had moved while he was gone.

Bucky wasn't the kind of boy who spent a lot of time fretting or worrying, which is not to say that he was never the sort of boy to dwell when there was something worth dwelling on. Dwell he did, and for weeks. He wondered what that song had been, and what was happening there now. He wondered what it was they had really done when they'd bled all over the Lion's table. He wondered if Loki was back home, too, and if so, what he was doing. If he'd managed to put his stolen book back before anyone caught him, or if he'd gotten in trouble (and if he had, what kind of punishment you got for stealing, when you were a prince). If Loki had gone back to Narnia yet, and found out what kind of world it was when it had things that weren't there in it. Bucky was pretty sure, thinking back to that weird day, that the Lion had said they would go back, but he hadn't exactly said when, and he sure hadn't said which one of them would get to go back first.

At first, it was the nasty-looking scar on his left hand that reminded him it had all really happened. By the time it had finished healing, Bucky was more likely to convince himself it had all been real by pulling out Loki's knife from underneath his mattress. It didn't look or feel anything like a kitchen knife, or even a pocket knife. It was much heavier than either of those, and the blade was fatter and very sharp. There was a stone in the hilt Bucky would later learn was a real emerald. Around the emerald, there was a design, squiggly lines that could have been more runes, or could have just been decoration.

If there was anything magical about that knife, Bucky never found out what it was. And he never tried to figure out what he could get for it, even though it was obviously valuable. To him, its purpose was something else. It was proof of other worlds, and of the weird kid he'd met while he was in one.


	2. Mirror, Mirror

It was the kind of silvery night you get in the winter, when the moon is full and the snow so newly finished falling that no one has yet been out with a shovel, or maybe even out at all. The snow under Bucky's boots was hard and crunchy, not at all the kind you could bend down and pack into an easy snowball. The air was so cold it hurt going in. He'd pulled the flaps on his hat down as far over his ears as he could, and shoved his hands into the gloves he usually kept in his pockets, but his ears and fingers were still numb, to say nothing of his face.

He turned so the wind would be behind him, just hoping his nose wouldn't fall off. His mom was always going off about the dangers of frostbite. If it hadn't exactly seemed too likely during the last couple of slushy weeks at home, it seemed like a much stronger possibility now.

He started walking, keeping his eyes peeled for shelter, or people, or a road, but what he really wanted was that first one. Something with four walls and a roof that would be dry on the inside. If it had a fireplace and a stack of wood in the corner, that would just be icing on the cake. Then he could warm up, and maybe get some sleep, and he wouldn't have to worry about what he needed to do next until the sun had come up.

He was so busy thinking about how nice it would be to have a fire that he must have walked right past the road. Or maybe he would have missed it either way, it was so narrow to begin with, and hidden by the same newly-fallen snow as everything else. In any case, he heard the sound from behind him instead of in front of him: other boots, crunching along.

Bucky stopped in his tracks, and listened, and looked in the direction in which he was listening. The crunching sound must have carried a way, for it was a few minutes before he saw the shadows, walking in a line. There were probably forty or fifty of them, hunched over against the wind. 

He had the feeling, right away, that something was wrong here. Who went marching through the woods on a night like this? Most of them had packs on their backs, like this was more than just a short walk. And there were little kids with them, who had to be carried, and were quickly shushed when they whined or asked a question.

The harder he looked, and the closer he got, the more sure Bucky was that they were scared, and running from something. He wondered from what. He wished he had a sword. Better yet, he wished he had a crossbow.

He hadn't decided what to do by the time one of them saw him--the second to last figure in the line, who had been looking back and forth as he walked, and occasionally turning around to see if they were being followed. He barked out something to the others who'd been walking at the back, and they all swiveled toward Bucky. There was a group of about five or so of them. They all had swords. All the swords were half-drawn by the time they had all finished turning.

Then someone, the very last person in the line, said, "Keep your peace. Do you not know a boy when you glimpse one?"

"A boy, or a spirit?" someone muttered. "Who knows what shape the Witch might take? My Queen, you cannot be certain of the risk."

Bucky had stopped in his tracks as soon as they'd seen him, knowing better than to walk up to a group of people with swords out. He tried to look harmless, which was unfortunately an endeavor which had gotten more difficult with time. When he'd been eight, all it had taken was smiling, maybe putting his hands into his pockets (as long as he wasn't in a store, where someone might think he was trying to pocket something). In the last year or two, though, things had changed. People never seemed to think he was harmless anymore, and only a little of it seemed to have much to do with him being best friends with a guy who was always looking for trouble. Girls' mothers, in particular, always seemed pretty suspicious of him these days.

But maybe the Queen wasn't a girl's mother, because she walked closed to him, just a couple steps, and lowered her hood. The moon was much bigger and brighter than the moon in Brooklyn ever was, and between it and the stars and the way all the light echoed off the snow, Bucky could easily see that she was older, with gray in her hair and very kind eyes. 

"What is your name, child?" she asked.

"Bucky Barnes, ma'am," Bucky said, and it wasn't the swordsmen that made him not even try to be cute, or charming as he said it. There was just something in the moment.

"Where are your people?" she asked. "Gone on ahead, I would hope--but surely they would not have left their son behind."

"We can't afford to send another search party behind, your majesty," said one of the swordsmen.

"Even less can we afford to leave a single of my subjects behind," she said.

"I don't have any family here," Bucky said. He wasn't sure what else he could get away with saying--it wasn't always smart to admit he was from another world. Sometimes it spooked people, and these people didn't seem like they needed to get anymore spooked. But he could at least say enough that they didn't spend time or resources they didn't have on him.

"Where might they be, then?" asked the Queen, with a piercing look.

But then someone said, "Here. I vouch for him," and another figure left the line of people who were waiting for this conversation to stop so that they could keep walking.

He came forward, and pushed his hood back, though there was no way he could have thought he needed to. It was just that he liked dramatic gestures, and flipping his hood down so everyone could see his face right as he stopped talking definitely counted as one.

"Hey, Loki," Bucky said, relieved in spite of everything.

And though there were a few more questions, there weren't any more that Bucky didn't have an answer for. A minute later, the line of people was on their way again, and Bucky was smack in the middle of it, walking next to Loki.

*

"How long have you been here?" Bucky asked, when enough other people had had short, whispered conversations that he figured them having one wouldn't make them seem too suspicious.

"Hours and hours," Loki said, which meant it had probably been half an hour tops. "I'm glad you finally made it. It's been so tedious up until now."

It still was, if by tedious he meant cold, and stressful, and with no idea of how much further they had to go. "Do you know what's going on?"

"Apparently there's a Witch. She invaded a week or two ago. She's been executing all the mortals and turning into stone all those who've attempted to help them. We're fleeing to the south--to Archenland, I think."

That was a lot more information than he usually had when he showed up fifteen minutes ahead of Bucky. Maybe he really had been here for a few hours. "So we're in Narnia?"

"Narnia proper, yes. Oh, and it's June here." Loki couldn't have seen Bucky's blank look, but maybe he intuited it, because right before Bucky would have asked, he added, "The Witch also seems to have caused winter to come early."

Bucky as an adolescent was no more prone to panic than he had been at eight, but this was all rattling news nonetheless. Worse than the dragon had been, and a whole hell of a lot worse than the pirates.

But before he could express any of this, someone in front of them said, "Shhh," just the way he'd heard them shushing the little kids before he'd been a part of the procession. So for now, Bucky shushed, and focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and on not thinking too much about everything he'd been trying not to think about, since the last time they'd been to Narnia.

*

"Any idea how close we are to the border?" Bucky asked, when it had been a while since the last time they'd been shushed.

"We were several hours away yet, when we came upon you," Loki said.

There wasn't much to say to that, and so Bucky didn't say anything. He was mostly focused on not slipping on the ground beneath his feet, which had gotten increasingly uneven. It had also gotten colder, and started to snow, which had made it even slicker underfoot than it might have been otherwise.

Then, a minute later, Loki said, "Look to your left. But carefully."

Bucky sneaked a peek over. What he saw was enough to make him suck in a breath--and a very painful one, considering how very cold it was and how he hadn't had any time at all to brace himself for it. For to the left of them, far enough away in the dark and snow that he couldn't make out exactly what they were, two or three shadows were moving. It soon became clear from the way they moved--back and forth, parallel always with the procession itself--that it wasn't just another group of people that had happened to be out tonight.

Bucky snuck a peek to the right, and beyond Loki he saw another shadow or two on the other side.

"Shit," he said. He wished again that he had a sword, or a crossbow, or a--

"Here," Loki said, and shoved something into Bucky's gloved hand. 

Bucky didn't have to ask what it was. He knew exactly what it was. His fingers wrapped around the knife's hilt, and he felt a little better. If there was going to be a fight, at least he'd have a weapon, even if he wasn't really good with most of them (after all, it wasn't like he got a whole lot of practice back home in Brooklyn).

Eventually, the others started to notice the shadows, too. Murmurs started, too many of them for any one of them to be shushed. But then the Queen spoke from the rear of the procession:

"I see you have noticed our escort. These are our friends, come at the last to defend us with their lives, should it be required of them. We shall ever owe them the greatest debt--but for this moment, we owe them our silence most of all, so that the debt will not be increased even more."

Everybody shut up then. The shadows seemed to come closer, and when they did, Bucky could see that there was a Stag, and a Leopard, and a Bull, and a Wolf. There were even a few smaller animals, such as Foxes and Hares. And when he looked up, he saw Squirrels hopping from branch to branch, and Owls occasionally swooping by.

And, one foot in front of the other, he kept walking. They all did.

*

Over the next however long, the wind got stronger, the snow got thicker, and the trail got steeper. Now there was no doubt that they were going up--and the more up they went, the slower they had to go. The footing was very slick and terrible. More than once, someone ahead or behind of them fell. More than once, whoever had fallen had to be helped up, and then everyone else went more slowly thereafter.

It seemed like it was never going to end. Some part of Bucky thought it never would. Even Loki, who claimed he wasn't at all cold, had stopped trying to have a conversation around the time the moon had disappeared and left everything that much darker (if not entirely dark, for there were still the stars to reflect off the white all around them).

Then, so gradually it took a while for anyone to notice, the night began to fade out into something much grayer, which itself began to turn into something much lighter. Bucky didn't realize any of this until he heard something else, a shocking, cheerful sound that didn't seem to belong in a winter night. It was the sound of birds singing, coming from somewhere up ahead.

For a second, it was almost enough to make a guy feel warmer--but only for a second. And when the second was over, Bucky felt colder than ever, hearing that sound when they might as well have been walking through Antarctica otherwise.

Everyone kept walking, a little faster now, slipping and sliding more than they should have been, but maybe it was hard for them to care. It was hard for Bucky to care, anyway.

His boot slid over a loose, frozen rock, and he almost went down on his ass, except that Loki grabbed his arm and yanked him closer. Bucky braced against him, just for a second and a step or two, and kept from falling.

Between the cold and the thick coats they both had on, there wasn't anything particularly weird about it. Still, Bucky thought he could feel his ears thawing under his hat, just a little, and was glad when he had his footing again and could put a few inches of distance between them.

The sun started to come up in earnest, lighting up the snow all around, leaving it sparkling almost to the point of being painful to look at.

Then there came someone else to look at. From up ahead, there was a hint of green. The closer they got to it, the more you could see that it was more woods, not too different from these other than the greenness of them. It didn't look real, and a distant part of Bucky wondered if he was really seeing it at all. 

He'd heard stories about the kind of thing that happened to you if you ended up lost in a blizzard--not the warnings he'd gotten from his mom, about how he was going to lose some extremities if he didn't put on his hat and gloves before leaving the house, but stories he'd heard from other people. When it was close to the end, you would think you were warm when you weren't; you'd strip off all your clothes and lay down in the snow and die there. The worst part of it, as far as Bucky was concerned, was that you'd never know what had happened to you.

Bucky didn't really think he was really lying somewhere, half-gone and dreaming in the snow. He was still so cold as to be numb. What's more, he had no intention whatsoever of stopping to strip. But if you have ever been in a very gloomy situation, and seen a clear end to it, then you too may have thought of a number of things that might prevent you from getting there, no matter how unlikely they truly are. This was what was happening to Bucky, who had been longing to warm up for what felt like so long that it was easier to believe the cold would never end than to let himself get his hopes up.

Then the people at the front of the procession started to cross over into the green. Then Bucky and Loki were there. Crossing the border was like stepping into a lovely heated home when you have been out doing some important task in mid-February--except that this was stepping from winter into summer, and thus lovelier than even that. There was grass beneath their feet, and the sun shone overhead, somehow much friendlier and nearer-seeming than it had been a moment ago.

Bucky and Loki turned to see the rest of the procession make it over, standing off to the side so they wouldn't be in the way. As soon as they did, the Queen turned to speak to the animals that had been escorting them. What she said, Bucky would never know, but she spoke for only a minute or two before they each inclined their heads to her, then melted back into the shadows, then disappeared.

It was around then that there came the sound of bells from behind them. The kids in the group started crying, while the adults erupted into a barrage of worried whispering, so much of it that Bucky couldn't make out what they were saying, or figure out what had set them all off.

Then the Queen said, "Do not fear. We are beyond the Witch's power now. Still, we must be moving. Onward."

*

This next walk was very short. All Bucky had the time to do during it was to start sweating underneath his coat, and decide he may as well take it off. He'd barely draped it over his arm when they broke into a clearing full of a bustling activity. There were tents erected everywhere, and people standing all around. As soon as the first person saw their group, everyone did; and then they all surged forward, and nearly everyone was crying or exclaiming. It was the sort of thing that was either very joyful (if you had found a loved one you thought lost) or very terrible (if the one you had been hoping for had not come) or very awkward (if, like Bucky and Loki, you knew no one in either group, and hadn't lost anyone).

"So, uh," Bucky said, when he and Loki had crept halfway across the clearing and had placed the tallest tent they could find between themselves and all of the emotions. "Any ideas?"

"Many," said Loki, with a barely-suppressed look of glee.

"About what we're supposed to do, I mean," Bucky said. They'd never come to Narnia to do nothing. "I don't think we need to be making anyone's life harder here."

Loki rolled his eyes, like he always did whenever Bucky objected to any of his ideas (or to the idea of Loki having ideas, which was never a good sign). "Fine. And I haven't the faintest idea."

"I don't think we can beat a Witch. Not if she can do...all that stuff."

"I agree," said Loki, so quickly that there had to be something else there that Bucky didn't know about. "Let's keep our heads down until we have the lay of the land."

Before Bucky could press him--it was never a good idea to let Loki get away with things--someone said, "Your names, if you please."

They both turned to see a bespectacled man holding a piece of parchment and a quill.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your names," the man said again, reaching up to adjust the way the glasses sat on his nose.

"Prince Loki," Loki said. "Of," which was when Bucky elbowed him, because Loki should have known better than to get into all that when they both remembered what had happened that time in Galma. "--Terenbithia."

"Welcome to Archenland, your highness," murmured the man, scribbling quite a lot down onto his parchment. 

He then turned to Bucky, but before either of them could say anything, Loki said, "And this is Bucky Barnes, my personal manservant."

Bucky rolled his eyes and elbowed him again for good measure. Maybe the man with the parchment didn't notice, though, because he'd drawn himself up, and was looking at Loki with a severe expression. "I don't know how things are done in Terenbithia," he said, "but we don't hold with slavery and such here."

"Oh, I pay him," said Loki. Bucky rolled his eyes again. "--But not very much, since he's terrible at his job."

"Is this true?" asked the man, looking at Bucky. "Don't be afraid to speak, if it isn't--you'll be protected from reprisal here."

If their positions had been reversed, Bucky knew exactly what Loki would have done. It would have been like he couldn't help himself. But as funny as it was to glimpse the momentary panic on Loki's face, and to imagine how his face would look if Bucky said no, Bucky was simply not the sort of boy to lie in order to get someone else into trouble. This went double if that someone was a friend he didn't get to see that often, and neither of them ever knew how long they'd be waiting til the next time.

"Have either of you family in Archenland, or are you expecting the same from the north?" continued the man, back to his first, businesslike manner. When they both said they didn't, he scribbled down quite a lot more on his parchment, while making little hmms and ahhs, then said, finally, in a spiel that sounded like he'd said it a hundred times already and expected to say it a few hundred more, "I'll speak to the steward, and make certain of a room for you in the palace. It should be made readied by tonight. Until then, you may go where you please in the country of Archenland--with one exception. If you should come upon a green wall in your travels (which is not so close to here, and yet boys do explore where they ought not), you are forbidden to climb it or otherwise enter the space which it protects. Is that understood?"

"Of course," Loki said, in a tone that might have sounded meek and obedient if Bucky hadn't known the gleam in his eyes by now.

"Sure," Bucky said.

And the man scuttled away. When they peeked out from behind the tent, they saw that he was headed toward the larger crowd of new arrivals, and did not seem to be looking their way at all. No one else was looking at them either. Everyone seemed to have enough to think about that wasn't them.

Still, though--

"The prince of Terenbithia? Really?" Bucky said, as they fell into step and began to walk down a well-used path that led in the direction the man had gestured when he spoke of the palace.

Loki shrugged. "The real one had evidently just arrived in Narnia when the Witch came. Hasn't been seen since, so he's unlikely to be alive at this point. It's a perfect disguise."

"Did you notice we came in with the Queen?" Bucky said. "You think she might figure out you're not him?"

"Doubtful. But even if she does, it should be easy enough to disappear among the masses."

Personally, Bucky didn't think either of them was that good at disappearing. They always seemed to get noticed, whether they kept their noses clean or not. They always stuck out, whether it was because of their clothes or the way they talked, or everything else that made them different from everyone else here. It was one thing they had in common, even if Bucky was from Brooklyn and Loki was from a world where magic was as real as it was here in Narnia.

"Do you even know where we're going?" Bucky asked a minute later.

But Loki ignored him. Instead, he went up to a girl around their age who'd just come around a twist in the path, and said, "Hello, miss. I wondered if you might help us with something." When she said she'd try--turning a little pink as she looked from Loki to Bucky and back again--he said, "We've been told to stay far from the contents of a green wall. Do you have any idea where such a thing might be, so that we don't stumble upon it unawares?"

She gave them directions, and Loki nodded along, and thanked her sweetly.

When she was gone, Loki said, "Well, that was simple enough."

"I can't believe you," Bucky said, which wasn't quite true; he'd known since the moment they'd been told it was forbidden that they'd be heading toward the green wall sooner or later. He wasn't even totally against the idea, not really. Going something they weren't supposed to seemed a lot more interesting than staying in the awkward middle of all those feelings.

Still, though, he followed Loki down one path and then another, shaking his head all the while. A couple times, Loki tried to start him speculating about what might be beyond the green wall, but Bucky just shook his head all the more.

After all, someone had to give Loki a hard time. Here in Narnia, it almost always had to be him.

*

A while later, Loki said, "You're being too quiet. What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing."

"Are you still upset about last time?"

There'd been a lot to be upset about last time, starting and ending with how Loki had refused to help with the baby, or even do any of the rowing. But it was him who'd gotten them off the ship in the first place, so it wasn't like he hadn't done anything. And it wasn't like Bucky had words for the hot feeling he'd gotten in his stomach as he'd watched Loki flirting with that girl, so he said, "Nah. I just think you're being stupid. Why do you have to try to get us in trouble all the time?"

"It's not as if there are lasting consequences," Loki said lightly. Then, when Bucky didn't agree with him, he sighed and sort of sagged and said, "You don't have to come, you know."

Bucky did know that. He knew it every time he went along with one of Loki's ideas that he probably shouldn't. If he was being honest with himself, he'd rather go along with Loki than wander around by himself. It was always more fun being with him, or at least more interesting. "Oh, come off it," he said, because the other thing he knew was when Loki was playing it up. "I'm here, okay?"

"I suppose, but it's more enjoyable for me when you have an investment," said Loki more or less earnestly.

*

It was late morning or maybe early afternoon by the time they made it there. Bucky would long since have dropped his coat somewhere along the way, had he not been aware of how distressed his mother would be if he were to show up back home without it. So instead he kept carrying it, and kept sweating, and once or twice had to stop in order to roll his long sleeves back up past his elbows. Loki, who had discarded his coat before they'd left the clearing, sighed and acted put-upon every time they had to stop.

The green wall turned out to be less of a wall and more like a hedge--except without any of the openings a hedge would have implied, and taller than anything Bucky would have wanted to try to climb over. It was also completely round, and when they walked around it, they found a gate on the other side. It was closed, and quite firmly locked. At least, it _was_ quite firmly locked, until Loki got involved. He glanced from side to side, then waved his hand at the gate. It opened on its own with an incredible screech, which only got louder once they had ducked inside and pushed it closed again (though not quite all the way closed, for they both knew they might need to leave in a hurry).

Unlike the hills they'd been going up and down on the way there, the ground inside the wall was completely flat. In front of them, there was a pool, which was completely level with the ground. At the other end of the pool there was a tree, which was much larger than any of the trees they'd passed on the way.

"Hmm," said Loki.

"I don't feel like swimming," Bucky said, though he had the sense he would have, had they been at the edge of any other pool. There was something too solemn about this one, like it wasn't made for the kinds of pursuits two teenage boys would otherwise get up to. "Can we go back yet?"

But he didn't really mean it so much as he was trying to push Loki's buttons. For the longer they'd walked in the warmth and sunshine, the more Bucky had started to feel he was up for an adventure, the doom and dark of the day's first walk receding away from them.

"Not yet," Loki said, in a distracted way that meant he somehow hadn't noticed Bucky's improved mood, even though he'd been able to pick up on his darker one pretty easily. "This appears to be a magical artifact."

"What kind?" Bucky said, not at first sure whether Loki meant the pool or the tree or something else that was invisible to the naked eye--but then Loki stepped over to the pool and peered into the water, and that cleared that question up.

"It's a looking-glass, of sorts, I believe. Not a mirror so much as a window. I wonder what it would take to--look through it--"

And so saying, Loki was gone, lost in muttering and more peering. There was no point talking to him until he figured it out, so Bucky didn't try.

Loki kneeled in front of the pool. After a minute, realizing that it might be a while, and that his feet were aching from all the hiking of the day, Bucky followed suit. The water was so clear that you could see clean down to the bottom, and so still that you almost thought that you could put your hand through it without disturbing anything, as if it had all the qualities of air. But Bucky knew better than to mess with anything magical without having first been told he might, and so when the urge to touch became too great, he looked at Loki's reflection instead.

He'd been trying not to look for hours, but Loki wasn't paying attention to him, and there was no one else here to see. So Bucky looked, and what he saw was Loki, looking the way he always did when he was focusing instead of scheming. Bucky looked, and he tried to figure out what it was that had made his stomach twist, and that had made him feel the strangest yearning, the last time they'd been in Narnia. Loki had been in the boat across from him, sleeping; the sun had come up, and Bucky hadn't been able to look away from the way it lit his face. He hadn't been able to figure it out anytime in the last six months, either. Why had he looked for so long? Why hadn't he been able to make himself look away until Loki had started shifting around like he was about to wake up?

Bucky'd spent the six months since trying not to look too hard at any of the other boys he knew, in case he saw the same thing, in case they noticed him seeing. Now he did look, and the twisting in his stomach came back, even stronger than before. He watched the reflection of Loki's hands moving in the water--long slim fingers speaking a language Bucky would never be able to learn himself, but loved to watch or even listen to--and felt the same ache in his chest he'd felt last time.

"There," Loki said after a while--maybe a long while, because it was only then that Bucky felt how stiff his legs were beneath him, like they'd been kneeling there for much longer than a few minutes. "Do you see it?"

"I don't see anything," Bucky said, and he wasn't really lying, because there was no way Loki was asking about their reflections.

"Hmm. Perhaps it would come more easily if you were to meditate."

"Nah."

"Why not?" Loki demanded, his reflection giving Bucky that look, the one that meant he didn't appreciate Bucky busting his chops and ruining his entire thing.

"I don't feel like doing all that oohming and ahhhming," said Bucky, who had a very limited experience with meditation of any kind, but who also thought (often rightly) that if Loki had failed to explain why he wanted him to do something humiliating, chances were that it wasn't going to be worth it.

Reflection-Loki rolled his eyes. "Not that sort of meditation. Merely--calm yourself. Breathe in and out, deeply and slowly. Concentrate on nothing except your breathing and the water. Not what you see in the water, or beneath it. The water itself."

"Okay."

So Bucky did that. The breathing was easy enough--he'd done things like this before for other magic spells or rituals--but concentrating on the water was harder. Their reflections were still right there, and in the moments he managed not to focus on them, he got tripped up by how clearly he could see the bottom of the pool. It wasn't concrete, like the city pool; it wasn't rocky like the bottom of a stream; the thing it was most like was the sandy bottom of the ocean. Except that the water wasn't moving, the way the waves did on the ocean. Maybe the water had never moved. 

The more Bucky looked, the more he thought he could see the individual grains of the sand or mud or whatever it was, there at the bottom. And the more he looked, the more aware he became of Loki's presence beside him. He couldn't turn his head to see him. He couldn't hear him. His breathing and Loki's, maybe they were the same things. Loki was moving, somewhere, and Bucky was still, but for a long moment there seemed to be no difference.

Later, Bucky would never be sure just how it happened. The surface of the water seemed to flicker. The space between grains of sand seemed to open up, until it was big enough to walk through, or fall into. Then everything else was gone, and all there was was what there was to see.

Mostly, what there was to see was snow and ice. Everywhere, so crisp and clear that Bucky could almost feel it again: a knife's edge of cold, the kind that would keep you wanting to shiver for hours even after you were someplace warm. He shuddered violently once, and then stopped, because no matter how cold it looked, he wasn't really in it.

"How about now?" Loki asked, his voice sounding very far away.

"Yeah. I'm here," Bucky said. The longer he looked, the clearer the picture was, and wider. It was like he could see all of Narnia, every snow-covered tree and every frozen lake and slowing stream, and the harsh wind that seemed to be blowing across all of it. It was all white, and it was all still, and as beautiful as it was, it was terrible, too. "Can't hear anything, though."

"And you won't," said Loki. "It's meant for viewing only, as far as I can tell. But surely there must be something more interesting to look at."

For a second, other places flashed across Bucky's vision. A ship with billowing sails on the ocean, far out of sight of land; a bustling city street where what was blowing around was sand rather than snow; a bright and endless desert and a river winding through the middle of a jungle and the snow-covered peak of a mountain among many other taller mountains and--

"I want to see the Witch," said Loki.

All the other possibilities snapped away, leaving them with just the one thing. Snow and ice, so cold you could feel it without having to be there. What made it colder was that this time there was a person in the middle of it all. Not just a person, but a person so tall and pale and cold that Bucky thought he would have known what she was with or without Loki saying anything. Maybe he would have known what she was even before seeing what she was doing. 

As they watched, she drew herself up even taller, in front of a group of animals Bucky hadn't noticed until now--a Bull and a Leopard and a Stag and a Wolf. As the Witch raised her hand, the Bull lowered its head and stabbed the snowy ground with its front foot, and the Leopard went low to the ground with a snarl, like it was about to leap. But then the Witch's hand came down, and the Bull and the Leopard froze where they were. It was a second before Bucky realized they weren't actually frozen, that they were gray and rough now where they'd been sleek before, and that the Stag and the Wolf beside them hadn't moved since he'd started looking. They had been turned to stone, just like Loki had told him about before.

"I don't like this," Bucky said, which was the understatement of the year, or possibly of his entire life. "Let's go."

"Shhhh," Loki said. "I want to see."

Bucky didn't want to see any more, but he didn't really have the choice. His legs still seemed to be there, somewhere, but they were far behind him now, and definitely not listening closely enough to take him away from here. 

Now, looking again--he'd never stopped--he didn't even seem to be able to close his eyes--Bucky saw that those four statues weren't the only ones. Others were everywhere, littering about half of the clearing in which the Witch stood. 

Now that there was no one else threatening her, the Witch turned to the empty part of the clearing, and raised her hand again. Now Bucky saw the wand she was holding, the one she might have had in her hand all along. Wherever she waved it, stone walls began to grow where before there had been none. It was a few minutes before Bucky saw the shape of it, and knew what it was: A castle, rising above the snow. If you have ever been inside during the summer and found it to be hotter and more oppressive in the shade than it is outside in the sun, then you may understand what I mean when I tell you that the Witch's castle was the opposite of that. Looking at her house, you felt that no-one who went inside would find it any warmer or more welcoming than it was outside, no matter how great and terrible a blizzard might be raging beyond her doors.

The Witch's wand slashed through the air like a sword or a whip. Every time it moved, Bucky felt a little colder. Colder than he'd ever been at home; colder even than he'd been earlier today, during that long dark walk. He was so cold he shuddered, his teeth clashing together so violently that it was really lucky that his tongue wasn't between his teeth.

Maybe he shivered too hard next to Loki, who seemed to be completely still. Or maybe the Witch would always have stopped, so suddenly that for a moment she could have been made of stone, too. Maybe she always would have turned her head, like she was looking right at them, like her eyes were boring deep into their eyes even though she had to be miles and miles and miles away.

"Can she see us?"

"No," Loki hissed back, the both of them speaking in whispers. "She shouldn't--but perhaps she can sense the pool's magic."

He must have had the truth of it, for then the Witch said, in a voice by far colder than anything they had seen: "What unworthy eyes seek to look upon Jadis, once Empress of Charn, and now Queen of Narnia? Reveal yourself, and perhaps we will spare your life."

She didn't look or sound like she was going to spare them anything. Maybe not even a thought, by the time she was done killing them or turning them into another couple of statues for her front yard.

Bucky was just about to say so when Loki said, "Out. _Now_."

And Bucky felt himself being tugged on, as if from very far away. And as he was being tugged, the Witch and her castle disappeared. Instead, there were other things, flashes he wouldn't even begin to be able to sift through for another few minutes or hours. And then he was falling backward, not being tugged so much as yanked away from the pool. He fell on his back on the soft grass, and then Loki's concerned face was looking down at him.

"You _are_ back?" he asked, eyes wild the way they got when one of his plans had gone really, really wrong. "Well, say something!"

"Give me a goddamned second and maybe I'll think about it," Bucky said.

The wild look went away, just as quick as it always did. "You're fine. As I suspected."

Bucky closed his eyes, for what felt like the first time in an hour, and then put his arm over them for good measure. Not seeing anything made it obvious how hard he was breathing--like he'd been running a marathon. And the front of his shirt was not so much damp as wet, like something had been spilled on him. After a minute or two, he sat up again, and saw that the water of the pool wasn't quite as still as it had been before--like it had been disturbed at some point, and was still settling back into itself. Loki was not quite looking at him. It was all enough to make a guy wonder just how long it had taken for him to come out of whatever trance the pool had had him in, and what Loki might have done before he'd decided to throw him like a ragdoll.

"I don't know what the hell that was, but let's never do it again," Bucky said.

"Agreed."

*

By the time they limped themselves back to the castle, it was almost dark. Considering it was also summer, that didn't say anything good about how long they must have been at the pool.

Dinner was over, but there were plenty of leftovers in the kitchen, and the cooks were more the type to call them poor things than to get suspicious about how they hadn't gotten back in time to eat with everyone else. Bucky never did figure out whether this had more to do with them having come in with the Narnian refugees, or if it specifically had to do with how rough they looked (even Loki was disheveled and exhausted-looking, with dark circles under his eyes; and Bucky always managed to be in worse shape than him, no matter what they'd been doing), though, to be honest, he also never thought about it again once they were back out in the hall with plates full of good food.

The food in Archenland is as fresh and good as the food in Narnia itself, even when slightly cold, and much of it was gone by the time Bucky and Loki had found someone to point them to their quarters, and then managed to actually find them.

"You'd think they could find something more befitting a prince than this," Loki grumbled as he licked the last crumbs off his fingers.

But the room was in fact very large and nice, with a eastward-facing window, so that you knew you would get the best of the morning sun. Across from the window there was a hearth, which might hold a hearty fire in the colder months, and across from the quite roomy bed there was a sofa nearly as wide. It was upon this they had sat to finish up their meal. 

"I'm guessing suites are in short supply right now," Bucky said, because someone had to knock Loki down off his pedestal every now and then, and it was better to do it on an as-needed basis than waiting until you had the energy. When Loki gave him a blank look, he elaborated: "I don't think they're about to give us three rooms when they have all those other people who need somewhere to sleep."

"I suppose," Loki said, which probably meant he was also too tired to argue.

And really, he must have been, because although it was getting dark enough that they were going to need a light if they were going to stay up, the next thing he did was go over to the bed and climb under the covers.

"Are you coming?" he asked. "I can procure you a flame, if you're going to stay up."

There was no reason Bucky's stomach should have twisted at the thought of laying down next to Bucky, but it did anyway. 

"Don't think I can move," he said, which was kind of, sort of, halfway true, in the sense that sitting down when you had been up for most of a day can indeed make rising again a very displeasing idea. "I might just sleep here."

"You will not. You'll get cold. Mortals do."

"You could throw me a blanket."

"I could not," Loki proclaimed, and now he made a light, just a little yellow one, which lit the room up just enough for Bucky to see the intense way Loki's eyes were studying him. "If I can't have three rooms, I will have three blankets. Which I am willing to share, but not give away."

"C'mon, Loki," Bucky said, which he knew wasn't going to get him anywhere, but was at least better than trying to explain the feeling he had.

"We are in the mountains, and you are bound to freeze if you don't cease acting bizarre. But suit yourself," Loki proclaimed, and then the light poofed out and he disappeared, into the darkness or under the blanket or both.

Sitting there on the sofa in the dark, Bucky had to admit Loki had a point. He'd sweated quite a lot on the walk to and from the pool; now he'd sat just long enough for it to begin drying on his skin, leaving him somehow even colder. It wasn't the bitter, aching cold from earlier in the day. What it was, though, was a little more lonely.

Finally, Bucky went around the bed, and climbed in next to Loki. He immediately found himself weighed down with all three of the blankets, which Loki had heaved at him, leaving himself with only the top sheet.

"Asshole," Bucky said.

"You're welcome, of course," said Loki, smugly. But it was a tired kind of smug, that came off like he'd only stayed just awake enough to get the last word.

He didn't say anything else, but was soon breathing the kind of slow, shallow breaths that let Bucky know he really was asleep and not just pretending. This left Bucky to warm up--slowly in some places, but more quickly in the parts that were under the section of the blankets Loki had been under first--and to feel more of the twisting inside, which now was more like some strange yearning. He and Loki had slept beside each other a bunch of times. They'd done it on every adventure they'd ever had that had lasted more than a day. There wasn't anything new about Loki breathing next to him, but Bucky was so much more aware of him than he had even been before that it may as well have been the first time.

At first, he thought there was no way he was going to be able to get to sleep. But then all of him was warm except for his extremities, and then slowly all of him was warm except for his feet, and then all of him was warm, and that was that.

*

When Bucky woke up, he was still warm. Too warm. He struggled out from beneath the covers, and found that the light from the window was indeed very bright. Loki was gone from the other side of the bed, but it only took glancing around the room to find him. He was reclined on the sofa, reading a thick book. It looked like (and it was) a very old one, but even though books tended to give Loki bad ideas at times, it wasn't what caught Bucky's eye. There was something about how Loki looked lying there all long and lithe and-- 

He felt the longing again, and the twisting in his stomach that had nothing to do with how badly he wanted breakfast (which was quite a lot, for he had for the past few years been eating his parents out of house and home). What would have come out of his mouth then, he never knew, because then Loki looked over at him and said:

"Do you have any idea how long you've been asleep?"

If Bucky had thought about it before, he would have assumed it was morning. But there was something wrong about that. The light coming through their window, while bright, wasn't bright enough to be morning light. It must have been close to noon, if not even later.

"I dunno, are you gonna tell me?" Bucky asked. 

It was the kind of reasoning that usually made Loki roll his eyes, which he did. "Nearly sixteen hours."

That was a long time. On the other hand, it had been the end of a Brooklyn day when Bucky had gotten here, and then they'd done everything they'd done and gone everywhere they'd gone, and then they'd had a huge dinner to make up for all of it.

"Sounds about right," he said.

Loki turned back to his book and flicked to the next page. "I suppose you'll want to eat before we go back."

"Yeah, and I'm gonna take a bath while I'm at it."

He didn't ask where Loki thought they were going back to. Loki was like a firefly when it came to magical things. The more he didn't understand it--and Bucky was completely sure now that Loki had no idea what he was doing when it came to the pool--the more he'd hover around it, getting closer and closer until someone got burned. It was always even odds who the someone would be.

But that was a conversation they could have later, after Bucky wasn't hungry or sticky or feeling like he was going to burst from how bad he'd suddenly realized he needed to piss.

*

It was a conversation they ended up having about ten minutes later. Bucky had managed to empty his bladder, and then he and Loki (who of course had tagged along, except to the toilet) were headed down to the kitchen again, when Bucky quite suddenly recalled what he'd dreamt about the night before. It had started out like a lot of his dreams did these days--shadows moving together in ways that made him feel strange to think about later, and that made his face suddenly hot at the thought that he'd had dreams like that when Loki was right there next to him. But then it had turned into something else, and it was that something that made him stop in his tracks, so suddenly that Loki (whose nose was still in that book, which he had taken from a locked chamber that had not been forbidden them only because he should not have been able to breach the lock in the first place) crashed into him and they were both sent sprawling onto the cobbled floor of the hall.

It was not really a very hard landing in the end, and it was perhaps not the fall itself that left Bucky breathless.

"Shit," he said, as they both picked themselves up and dusted themselves off. "We have to go back."

"--I was planning on it, as soon as you've finished lounging around the palace," said Loki, who had probably been lounging around for the past six or seven hours.

"No, I mean we have to go back to Narnia."

Bucky was as sure of this as anything in his life, but his certainty must not have transferred over, because Loki just stared at him.

"Why would we want to do that?" he asked, around the time he must have figured out that staring wasn't going to make Bucky back down all by itself.

"I saw something," Bucky said. "Maybe--a few things. When you were yanking me away from the pool."

"That was _yesterday_ ," Loki said, like he wasn't the kind of guy who had three grudges Bucky knew of that went back at least a century. "Why are you only bringing this up now?"

"I didn't really remember it til now," Bucky said, and there was no reason this should have been true--except that it was, even if what he really meant was that he hadn't seen it very well before. It had been a thousand visions, over the course of a second or two, each flashing by so quickly he hadn't been able to go through them at the time. There had been a mother Fox peering out of her burrow at the still-falling snow as her babies, her cubs staring with wide eyes from behind her; a trio of summer-thin Bears walking along a lakeshore, leaving footprints in the snow behind them; a Nyad reaching down as if to run her fingertips through the surface of the river, except that the river was frozen, and the Nyad slowed and slowed, and then was still, made out of ice instead of stone. Later, he'd think maybe he'd seen everything there was to see in Narnia at that moment, or at least everything that wasn't the Witch. For now, all he was thinking of the one flash that had seemed even more wrong than the rest.

Of course, none of this was the kind of conversation you could have when you might be within earshot of grownups, and they were now only a few steps away from the kitchen. There was only so long they could hiss at each other in a whisper before someone would come and see what they were up to.

"Tell you in a minute," Bucky said. And while they ducked into the kitchen, and picked out several arms' worth of food more or less at random, he thought about just how to put it to Loki. He thought about it while they walked around looking for a good private spot to talk, which turned out to be a shady spot behind the stables. He thought about it while he ate--wanting to eat slowly, to gather his thoughts even more, but feeling as if scarfing his food down was already taking more time than they had.

When he was done, he put it to Loki, clearly as he could--which could not have been very, for quite a lot of information had come into his mind all at once, and it is often difficult to know where to begin a story. But Loki seemed to get it anyway, for he nodded along, and only asked a few clarifying questions, the last of which was:

"And what did you see that is so wrong?"

"There's a girl," Bucky said. She'd been hiding in the hollow trunk of a tree, almost invisible beneath blankets and straw. Someone must have tucked her in there, nice and warm. "A little kid. I think--I think the Witch is looking for her."

He could not have said why he was so sure of this, except that he was.

"That's too bad," said Loki, sounding almost sympathetic enough for Bucky to think this might go over easier than he'd thought it would when Loki had been staring at him in disbelief.

"We have to go get her."

"No."

So much for that idea. "What do you mean, no?"

"We cannot return to Narnia."

"Why the hell not?"

"For one thing, there's the Witch. I've felt enough of her power to know I would require years (if not decades) to be able to counter her," said Loki. "For another, any mortal child who's been out there all night must surely have perished already."

"And if she didn't, she's scared, and she's cold, and no one even knows she's there but us. We have to go find her."

Bucky didn't have any evidence of that last part, but it was something he was as sure of as his own name, somehow.

"I suppose we might look for her in the pool, when we return to it," Loki said. "Then, if she yet lives--"

"That'll take too long," Bucky said, and he was just as sure of this as he'd been of the other thing, even though he was usually the first one to say they ought to look before they leaped. "We have to go now."

"We don't even know what other horrors those woods might hold. Would it not be better to go in prepared?"

Bucky opened his mouth to say that the Witch was the only really bad thing there, at least for right now. Then, because he couldn't honestly say that, or be sure he'd seen every nook and cranny of the entire country, he said, slowly, "Horrors like what?"

"Well. There might be Frost Giants, for all we know."

"I don't think they have those in Narnia," Bucky said, beginning to be well and truly annoyed now. "Anyway, I thought you said you and Thor had killed thousands of them."

"It was cold and dark enough, there at the end of our march; if there are Frost Giants in this realm at all, then surely they must be in Narnia now." There was no telling whether Loki actually believed this, or if he was just trying so hard to sell it to Bucky that neither of them would be completely sure later whether he'd believed it or not. "They have horrifying red eyes, and hands so cold the slightest touch gives a man frostbite (imagine what a blow would do!). They stand a hundred feet tall--"

"Pretty sure someone would have noticed that. We're in the mountains, remember?" Bucky said, thinking of how high the castle stood, and of the watchtowers built in around it--and refusing to think about what it meant for Loki to be that white around the eyes.

"I suppose the small ones might only be twenty feet tall," said Loki stiffly. "Or so."

"Well, if you spot any while we're there, feel free to run away." Bucky said this quite a bit more viciously than he might have if the argument had been about anything less important or less stupid.

Loki sounded even more stiff when he said, "I'm not concerned for myself, of course. But you _are_ a mortal--"

"If you're really that worried about me, you should come. If not, you may as well go back to the pool and watch me."

So saying, Bucky made to get to his feet and go by himself.

He'd barely stood all the way up when Loki sighed and said, "If you're going to insist on this madness, _I_ am going to insist we take a horse."

*

Bucky was terrible at horses, which is to say he was bad at making them go where he wanted them to go at the speed he wanted them to go there--and even worse at staying on them while they went. This was why, after they'd managed to liberate one without anyone seeing them, he ended up riding behind Loki, with his arms around Loki's middle.

There was no time to think about being up close and personal with Loki, or if it felt any different than it had the last time they'd ridden double. There was too much thudding and thumping for anything like that, as Loki guided the horse southward, on the trail sometimes and other times off it completely, and occasionally telling Bucky to duck his head.

"Hold on," Loki said, a few minutes later, and then they burst out into a clearing, the same one they'd arrived in before. There were people there, just like there had been yesterday. They didn't dodge them so much as Loki pointed the horse at the other end of the clearing like he expected everyone to get out of his way. And they all did, shouting at them as they thudded by. So many of them were shouting that it was hard to hear what any one of them was saying. 'You're going the wrong way,' maybe. 'Are you crazy,' probably. Maybe even, 'That's my horse.'

Then they were across the clearing, and then they could see the line between summer and winter, and as soon as they had crossed it, Bucky remembered something really important.

"I left my coat in the room," he shouted, half expecting Loki to use it as another reason they should go back. But a second after he said it, he had his coat back; and not only did he have it, but he was wearing it, too. When, a minute later, they were on a straight and level road long enough for him to dare to let go of Loki for a second, he found his pockets just as he had left them, and was able to pull on his hat and gloves as well.

Now, there was no reason whatsoever that they should have been able to know where the girl actually was. The thing was, though, that he somehow knew when they were going in the right direction, and when they needed to turn to the left, or to the right, or to alter their course just a little, and was able to guide Loki in the right direction. Loki, for his part, didn't argue about the directions themselves; maybe because he had a way of knowing that what Bucky was feeling was real, or maybe because he really was humoring him. There was no way to know, and for a while all that seemed to matter was that they were doing something. It didn't make the woods any less cold, but somehow the cold didn't seem to matter as much as it had before.

At least, it didn't until they had been riding for about twenty minutes. It was around then that Bucky said, "Wait. Stop."

Loki reined in the horse. "What is it?"

"I don't know where we're going anymore," Bucky said. "I lost it."

A minute ago, he'd had no doubts at all, had known where they were going as surely as he'd ever known anything. Now the certainty was gone, so totally he could hardly remember what it had been like to be that sure.

"Perhaps the pool's magic has faded. Or perhaps the effect is like that of a tether, and we've passed beyond its reach."

"We're not going back," Bucky said.

"Did I say we were?"

"You were thinking it. Help me come up with a better idea."

Loki was quiet for a second. Then, he said, "Do you recall anything else from your vision? Some landmark that might be visible from farther away?"

"Not really," Bucky said. There had to be dozens or hundreds of hollow trees in these woods.

"Mmm. Well, you could try meditating upon the matter again. No oohming or ahhing required. Simply breathe in, and breathe out again. Focus on nothing except your breathing, and on the tree as you saw it in the pool. Don't _try_ to look around, or _try_ to see anything else. Don't force it. Simply let it come if it wishes to."

"Okay," Bucky said, and tried it. 

It wasn't as easy as it had been yesterday, at the pool. The cold which hadn't seemed to matter when he was thinking about something else seemed to matter with a vengeance as soon as he closed his eyes. The thump thudding of the horse plodding through the snow didn't help, either. For a minute, the most distracting thing of all was the way his arms were still wrapped around Loki's middle (for he couldn't exactly let go, not with his eyes closed). Eventually, though, it all seemed to be in the background, behind his own breathing and far away from the sight in front of his closed eyes. For a second, he saw something, out of the corner of his eye.

"Bucky," Loki said harshly.

Everything that had receded came back in time for Bucky to hear a sort of crunching from the side. He turned his head and saw what Loki must have seen--a large, yellow shape, heading quickly toward them in the snow. It bounded up to them with wild eyes and an open mouth, and stopped just a few feet shy of their horse.

"You mustn't be here," it said, and that was when Bucky's eyes made sense of what he was seeing, and he knew it was a Lion.

(There is exactly one person anyone who knows much of anything about Narnia will think of when encountering a Talking Lion--but it could not have been clearer that this was not _that_ Lion. For one thing, it was too small by half; and it seemed somehow younger and sillier than that other person you may have thought of.)

"You mustn't be here," it (or rather, he, for now that the Lion had come into focus, it was clear that it had a mane) said. "All Sons of Adam are meant to be across the southern border now. You must turn back, and at once."

Beneath Bucky and Loki, the horse sidled to the side, bouncing beneath them in a way Bucky knew couldn't be good. He half-expected her to start trying to throw them off. If she did, there was no way he wasn't going to fall.

It was very fortunate for them, in the next few seconds, that this particular dumb horse had been born in Archenland, raised from a foal in that part of it where she was as likely to see Talking Beasts going by her paddock as anyone else. It was even more fortunate that Loki was a very good rider indeed, even more skilled at diffusing a steed than he was at riling up everyone else. Had both of these things not been true, the horse might indeed have thrown them both and run back to her own stable; and then the rest would have turned out very differently.

As it was, though, the horse soon stopped with the bouncing, and stood very nearly as calmly as she had in the stableyard when Bucky had had to jump up three times in order to finally make it onto her back (though Loki's hands hadn't gripped the reins nearly so tightly then).

"You _must_ turn back," the Lion said again, his head tilted at the display he'd just witnessed.

"You heard him," said Loki, who as far as Bucky could tell never heard anything anyone else said if it didn't fit in with what he wanted to do anyway.

"We're going to as soon as we find what we're looking for," Bucky said. "There's a little girl. She's somewhere around here. We have to bring her back with us."

"A girl, you say? What sort of girl? Not a Human girl, I'm certain," said the Lion, while sounding rather doubtful.

"A human, yeah. She's hidden somewhere. We're trying to get to her before the cold does. Or the Witch."

Loki's elbow met Bucky's stomach when he said that last part. And maybe it really hadn't been the best idea to mention the Witch to the first person they met in the woods--but with the way the Lion's eyes flashed, and the way he snarled, Bucky figured it was pretty clear whose side he was on.

"If there's a Human girl around here, we must find her, of course," the Lion declared, after a long moment where his head stayed tilted and you could practically see him working on the problem inside his head. 

Loki muttered, "Of course," and may very well have rolled his eyes as well. But no one paid him any attention, for Bucky and the Lion were now of a mind in this matter, intent on the puzzle before them.

"She's hiding in a tree trunk--or at least, someone was putting her inside one, when I saw her," Bucky said. "Do you know of any big hollow trees around here?"

The Lion blinked at him. "We Lions aren't much for climbing, we aren't."

Bucky thought back, to the vision, and to the meditating he'd done on it before the Lion had shown up. Out of the corner of his eye, he'd seen something, and it had been--

"Are there any houses around here? You know, like where people--I mean, where humans would live?"

"There are five houses within a mile of where we stand," said the Lion. "I know right where they all are, for I'm a Lion."

"We'd noticed," said Loki (who surely would have provided a great deal more scathing commentary, had not most of his attention remained upon convincing the horse not to change her mind on the matter of bolting).

"Do you know of any houses that could have had a fire?" Bucky asked, for what he had seen, what he was almost sure he had seen, was flames licking at the logs the house had been made of.

The Lion blinked at him again, and it seemed to slump a little where it stood, as if it had just been reminded of something awful. "There has, yes--I've been there myself, since it happened. But there can't have been a Human child there."

"Let's go find out," Bucky said.

*

Off one of the wider trails in that part of the woods was a very narrow path, which weaved in and out through the trees until it found a very small house in a very small clearing. It must once have been a lovely place, built by and for lovely people, who had liked nothing better than to spend as much time as possible in the company of their neighbors in the out-of-doors. Now, it was something else, as ugly as it must once have been beautiful. The log walls were blackened, the front window blown out and the door hanging off its hinge. Even the roof was caved in. 

All the same, they might have looked inside for any survivors if they hadn't seen the statues on one side of the yard. There were five of them. Three were shorter, frozen in motion as they must have been running away; the other two were taller, in a defensive stance with weapons in their hands, their backs to the shorter ones.

"I thought you said they were killing all the humans," Bucky said to Loki in a low voice.

"I was told they were," Loki said.

"The Witch has slain most of the Humans she's found," said the Lion. "I don't know why she turned these to stone, instead. Oh, if only I had been here to stop her."

Along their walk, they had learned that the Lion was a sort of steward of this part of the woods--that it was his job to watch over everyone who lived here, and to try to resolve smaller grievances among them, and make certain larger ones were brought to the attention of the Queen. It was a job Lions of all beasts were uniquely suited to, for even if everyone knew you weren't Aslan, everyone was still more likely to listen to you than they were to heed, say, an equally silly Bear.

"You know this family, right?" Bucky asked, dismounting from the horse. On another day, he would have been pretty proud of himself for landing on his feet instead of his ass. "How many kids did they have?"

"There were four, once," said the Lion.

Bucky glanced over at the statues again, just long enough to be sure there were still only three shorter ones. Then he turned to look on the other side of the clearing, where the tree from his vision should have been. Though there were any number of trees around, but the one he was looking for couldn't have been more obvious. It was a huge, wide thing, which must once have been a grandfather among trees in these parts. Now, most of it was gone, leaving it just a little taller than a boy in the middle of a growth spurt.

Now that they were here, there was a part of Bucky that didn't seem to want to go any farther. A part that didn't want to look, because then he'd know for sure if he'd been wrong, or even just too late.

He went anyway, stepping gingerly over this exposed root or that one as he circled the tree to find the opening. For a second, he thought maybe there wouldn't be one, that the pool hadn't shown him reality exactly, or there was a puzzle he was going to have to solve first. It wasn't like it would be the first time.

But then he saw it, a hole that didn't seem as large or as far from the ground as it had in the pool. If he hadn't known to look for it, he could have walked right by it without noticing anything. He had to crouch down to be certain it was really there, and not just a trick of the light.

Magic, he'd figure out later. Someone good must have put a spell on or around that tree to keep anyone from finding out what was in it. For now, though, he wasn't thinking about that. As soon as he was sure the opening was there, he reached in--

("There might be a serpent in there for all you know," said Loki from behind him. Bucky may have gone more slowly and gingerly than he'd thought, for Loki's breath plumed to the right and the Lion's to left, and the horse had in the meantime been very firmly tied to a tree.)

\--and kept reaching in, until his gloved fingers hit something soft.

The soft thing jerked away from him, and a shriek came from inside the tree.

Bucky crouched down more, and squinted, and thought he could almost see something in there.

"Hi there," he said, in the nicest voice he could. "We're not going to hurt you. We're here to help."

He waited for a few seconds, but there wasn't anything else from inside the tree. So then he kept going, not really sure of the kind of thing he should say in this situation, but figuring maybe he could go with the same philosophy Loki did with the horse. Meaning, if the horse hadn't really cared how much Loki called it a nag if he said it in a soothing tone, maybe a little kid wouldn't care if Bucky stumbled a little, just as long as he sounded friendly while he was doing it. So he kept it up for a few minutes, talking about what had happened at school last week and what Steve had done to get himself two black eyes the other day, and the other horses he'd seen in Archenland just an hour or two ago.

Girls loved horses, for some reason--Bucky's own sister was crazy about them--and so maybe that was what did it. Whatever it was, there came a shifting from inside the tree, and then there was a whole face looking out at him.

"Hi there," Bucky said again. "I'm Bucky. What's your name?"

"Shona," the little girl said with a sniffle.

She twisted forward a little more, and then Bucky was able to reach in and pull her out the rest of the way. He picked her up, and she was about the size Becca had been when she'd been three or four, which made her a lot easier to carry now than Becca had been back then.

"Close your eyes for a minute," he said when he was done gathering her blankets up from inside the tree, and her her bundled up good and warm against the winter air.

Shona screwed her eyes tightly shut, and Bucky managed to get by the statues without her seeing them.

"It really is the Daughter of Eve," said the Lion, with a joy that was barely concealed when he said, in a tone that he probably meant to be much sterner than it was: "And now you _must_ return to Archenland."

"I believe that was the idea," Loki said dryly.

"Yep," Bucky said.

"I will escort you to the border," said the Lion. "Let us make haste."

*

Riding three astride wasn't really the most comfortable thing, especially with the fit Loki put up about the order being Shone in front of Loki in front of Bucky. But she couldn't be between them, and if she and Bucky were both ahead of Loki, there was no way he'd be able to drive. No one was walking, and it was probably a bad idea to have a three year old ride a Lion.

So they got started probably ten minutes after they should have. Loki was pouting, and the Lion had pointed out that he was a Lion about twenty more times, and Shona had already cried because she couldn't pet the horsie's nose, and Bucky was getting really sick of everyone (and, while he wasn't the sort of boy to go out of his way to hurt the feelings of new friends he'd just met, he was not above sniping at Loki, and had done so several times). It is very likely no one was paying much attention to their surroundings, and just as likely that it would have made no difference if they had.

The Lion several feet ahead and to the right of the horse, they rounded a turn in the path (they had, perhaps foolishly, gone back the same way they'd come in), and came face to face with a giant.

At least, that was what Bucky thought at first; that was how tall the person in front of them seemed. Not a hundred feet tall, not even twenty, but tall enough that even sitting on a horse, Bucky had to look up to see her face. The Witch--for of course, that was who it was--looked exactly like she had in the pool, but somehow even colder and more terrible.

"What fools are these, who trespass in our dominion, and seek to take what is Ours?" she said, so coldly it would have made you shiver on even the hottest summer's day. "Release the Human child and perhaps we shall yet permit you to live."

"Never," said the Lion, and looking at him the Witch seemed to falter, and grew for an instant even more pale. Then she smiled, and it was a smile as cold as her speech had been.

"Never?" she said, raising her wand as the Lion leapt toward her with claws unsheathed and a great roar in his throat. "May you ponder on Never long, when I leave you to stand guard outside my house."

For of course even as the Lion leapt for her, the Witch's wand came down; and when the Lion's paws met the snow once more, he was grey and cold instead of soft and yellow. He had been turned into stone.

"Loki," Bucky said, already wondering why they hadn't run, the second the Lion had made his move. "Loki, c'mon."

"And _you_ ," said the Witch, and now her wand was pointed at them. "It was you whose eyes watched the building of my house. Do not think to lie; I know where I have felt such sorcery before."

"It was," Loki said in a strange, thick sort of voice, sounding not at all like himself.

"Who are you, pray tell?" the Witch asked. "I have heard tell of none like you in this world, and I will know why."

"I am prince Loki of Asgard."

The Witch laughed, a harsh, wild, somehow desperately unhappy sort of sound. "And where is this Asgard? I have never heard of such a land."

"It's not a land, exactly," said Loki, in a flat, almost bored kind of voice. "It is a realm. It is the greatest branch upon the World Tree, which stands far outside your reach."

Normally, Bucky loved to hear Loki talk about the world he'd come from. He liked to imagine what it would be like to look up from wherever you were and see the gigantic branch you'd come from stretching across the whole sky. Maybe, depending on where you were, to see the other branches, the ones that went to all those other magical countries. Now, though, he just wanted to scream. To tell Loki that they had to go, and they had to go _right now_. But as much as he tried, he found he couldn't say anything--that there was something stopping him from saying anything, no matter how urgently the words bunched together in his throat.

"So you have come from outside this world," said the Witch, with an even greedier look in her eyes than she'd started out with. "Perhaps you've come by way of the rings."

"Rings?" Loki said, and for just a moment seemed more animated than he had since they'd run into the Witch (for he must have spent many decades trying to find his own way into Narnia by then). "What rings?"

The Witch's demeanor changed almost as fast as she could raise her wand. "It is no matter. I can see now that you do not have them. Tell me, then, of how you have come to be here. What great, primal magic have you invoked? How much blood have you shed to come here? How many slaves have you sacrificed? _Tell me_."

"I," Loki said, and seemed to falter, though that was something Bucky noticed only distantly; it was the Witch who had come to fill his vision and thoughts and everything, the same way a blizzard will, until you can see nothing but the white. "I haven't--what?"

"Do you think I cannot see you reek of the Deep Magic? Do not think to deceive me, or to have me believe that there is anything of blood magic you do not know. Do not think to tell me you do not know what I could do if I had all four."

The way she looked at Shona (who'd been loudly sobbing through all of this, in a way that was somehow so muffled that if Bucky had noticed it before, he would have thought there was another kid a mile or two away who needed help) was very nasty and very frightening. 

All four, Bucky thought, and even as he shivered, he was thinking about the three shorter statues, the ones who might stay standing in that glade forever.

"I can see you are a great sorcerer," said the Witch, and even if it was supposed to be flattery, Bucky would think later that there must have been at least enough truth in it to explain why she hadn't turned them to stone right off the bat. "I can see even more than that."

Loki's voice rang greedy and somehow flat against the great white calm. "What do you see?"

"You are the brother of the cold. You could be a master of winter. A King, ruling by my side. Together, we could bring Winter to all of this world. It need not take centuries; it need not take even years. Not if you give me the girl. Together, we could take Archenland, Calormen. We could take the Isles, and all that lies beyond. Within the year, our ice could be at the emperor's very doorstep, across a newly-still sea."

Even with his thoughts all fuzzy and white, even without being able to see Loki's face, Bucky knew something was wrong. That there was something messed up about this, even if he couldn't remember what it was anymore. There were things he needed to say, something he needed to stop, but there was a chasm, too, and no way he could think of to cross it.

"If I give you the girl," Loki said.

" _Yesssss_ ," said the Witch, and stepped forward, not holding her wand as tightly or as high as she had been a moment before.

Bucky wasn't thinking. There was no point in that. Instead, he was reaching. In his pocket, for something he had put there what must have been a thousand years ago. He pulled it out, and moving at all was like trying to walk in hip-deep snow, but no one was watching him. And then Loki's knife was in his hand, and his hand was coming down, and then Loki screamed. Everything seemed louder and brighter than it had a second ago, and somehow a thousand times more real. Bucky looked down and saw the hilt of the knife protruding from Loki's thigh.

"Loki, _c'mon_ ," Bucky said, seeing the shock on the Witch's face and knowing it couldn't last, and trying to figure out if he jumped off the horse, if it would give everyone else a chance--

But he never had to find out, because by the time he'd finished saying it, by the time the Witch had raised her wand, fifteen or sixteen other horses had popped into view. Some of them were rearing at the Witch and some of them were running away, and then the real horse beneath them was one of the ones running away, thudding and thumping at record speeds across the snow. Every time Bucky looked behind them, there were one or two fewer horses as the Witch kept waving her wand to disappear them, and then they went around a thick group of trees and couldn't see the Witch anymore. 

*

Every time he turned around, Bucky expected to see the Witch. Every time they went around a bend, he thought she would be there. But she never was. And then they could see a little sliver of green again. It got closer and closer, so much more quickly than it had the day before. And then they were in it, surrounded by it, and winter was behind them. 

The horse, no longer being urged forward, slowed, and then stopped. When Bucky slid off her back, her sides were heaving, and she was covered in a white lather. By the time Loki handed Shona down to him, they were surrounded by people, and Bucky was explaining what had happened. He never did remember exactly what he said. All he ever remembered, specifically, was what happened when he was done saying it.

"I don't know whether to knight you or whip you," said the Queen of Narnia, though perhaps not quite as severely as she might have if Shona's aunt, who was in the crowd and had yet to let her niece leave her arms, hadn't started crying in the middle of Bucky's story.

"Someone ought to take a horsewhip to both of them for what they've done to my mare," muttered the man who'd taken the horse's reins from Loki almost before he'd hit the ground, and then handed her off to a groom (who was, it must be said, rather miffed to have to spend all those minutes walking her instead of listening to Bucky's story). 

"Your Majesty," said the man with the glasses, the one who'd written down their names before. "However you choose to proceed with his punishment or lack thereof, it may be prudent for you to send an accounting of his activities to his parents."

He gestured to Loki when he said 'this one,' but the Queen just looked confused. "And who are his parents, pray tell?"

"Why, the king and queen, of course," said the man, not sounding half as sure by the end of the sentence as he did at the beginning. The following one was very nearly a question: "This is the prince of Terenbithia."

"No," the Queen said slowly. " _This_ is the prince of Terenbithia."

She gestured at a boy about half Bucky and Loki's size (who had until the last quarter-hour been the most exciting thing to emerge from beyond the Narnian border that day, having evidently followed their trail all the way from Cair Paravel all by himself).

Bucky and Loki looked at each other.

"--Run," Loki said.

And so they did.

*

How exactly they managed to outrun all those adults, Bucky would never be sure. Maybe they'd just been too tired to chase them. For sure he and Loki had had a lot of terror to fuel their head start.

By the time they were far enough ahead to risk slowing down a little, Loki was limping.

"Shit, your leg," Bucky said. "Are you okay?"

"It would take more than a prick to fell a prince of Asgard," Loki said, but he limped more and more the farther they got, and didn't even make a show out of it.

"Where are we going, anyway? Do you even know?" Bucky asked, though by then Loki looked so tired and was obviously trying so hard that he didn't really expect an answer.

Still, though, he wasn't too surprised when, after they'd been half-trotting, half-walking for a long time, they wound up in front of a familiar gate. Somehow he hadn't noticed the green turf wall they'd been passing; the time he didn't spend looking at his feet was either spent looking behind him or watching Loki to make sure he didn't fall over. 

"I think you need to reconsider your priorities," Bucky said.

"I told you I desired to come back here. Considering we're being pursued, who knows when we might have another chance to examine it?"

Well, he had a point. And it wasn't like Bucky had a better idea.

Inside the fence, they flopped onto the ground--not by the pool, which was fully visible from outside the gate, but a few feet to the right of the gate, which wasn't. Loki stretched his left leg out, then leaned over his thigh. By the time Bucky figured out what he was going to do, he'd already done it, yanking the knife out with a pained grunt.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Bucky asked. "Do you need me to do anything?"

"No. It should heal quickly. It only hasn't yet because the blade remained."

Somehow, thinking of Loki's leg trying to knit itself around the knife didn't make Bucky feel any better. Actually, it made him feel worse. He knew he hadn't had another choice, not with whatever the Witch had been doing to them to keep them trapped there with her. He couldn't even think of something else he could have done now, with a clear head and the benefit of hindsight. But he'd hurt Loki, and there was no way he wasn't going to feel bad about it.

"Okay," he said, instead of any of the other things he could have said. After Loki had cleaned the knife off, he offered it back, and even though he didn't really want it anymore, Bucky took it.

They sat in the corner for an hour or so. Every once in a while one of them would get the idea to peek over the wall to see if anyone was coming. Each time, the other one would point out that sticking their heads above the wall meant anyone who _was_ looking for them would have that much easier a time finding them. But mostly, they just sat there, enjoying the sun. Bucky half-dozed a couple times before a snippet of some cold nightmare woke him up again. Loki seemed to spasm awake a couple times too, like the same thing was happening for him.

When the sun finally started going down, Loki said, "It's dusk. No one will see," and headed over toward the pool.

Figuring he was probably right, and really tired of laying with his head pillowed on his rolled-up coat, Bucky followed him.

"What do you want to do now?" he asked, though personally he'd have been just as happy to do whatever it was in the morning. "You better not look for the Witch again."

"I would like to know what she meant, when she said those things of me. But no. I don't intend to turn my eyes to the Witch again. At least not tonight."

Bucky was about to say that what she'd meant was that she was weaving a spell around Loki, like a spider's web, and when he was all wrapped up in it she'd been going to take what she wanted and turn them both to stone--and that was only if she didn't outright kill them. He was about to say that, but they were at the pool now, and even though it was getting dark, they could see their reflections in the water. They seemed to be shining out from it. Bucky was there, but what he couldn't look away from was Loki. His left thigh was covered in dried blood, and his always too-long hair was lanky and constantly falling into his face. He was just as filthy as Bucky was, and there were circles under his eyes even darker than the ones he'd had before, like he hadn't slept for years--and somehow, he was still the most beautiful thing Bucky had ever seen.

Bucky was not a boy prone to panic, but for a few seconds after thinking this, he felt something very like it. Boys didn't call other boys beautiful. They sure didn't spend six months not thinking about the way their chests had hurt looking at another boy in the dawn light. If they did, if it ever happened, he'd have heard about it. He'd heard plenty of other things, when it came to girls. If there'd been anything to know about boys, he'd have heard that too, by now.

Who knew what he might have said, or done, if something else hadn't happened before he could get that far.

In the water, their reflections seemed to shimmer, although the water itself hadn't moved. Then they faded away, until they were all the way disappeared. Something else faded in, slowly but surely, so inevitable that Bucky wasn't at all surprised to see that it was a Lion. It wasn't a regular Lion like the one they had met in the woods. This was _the_ Lion.

"Boys, boys," Aslan said. "That was very well done."

"Must we go already? I wished to have another chance at the pool," Loki complained. 

But Aslan laughed, the way he almost always seemed to laugh when Loki talked. Even Loki never seemed to feel as if it were a mocking laugh; it was too fond and too knowing for that. "You would find the pool would not work for you in the same way again, for it is not yours to command. But yes: your task is finished, and it is time you were returned home."

A few minutes ago, Bucky wouldn't have been ready to go yet, either. Now, though, he was so filled with confusion that it was all right with him.

"What question is on your mind, O Bucky Barnes?" Aslan said.

Bucky wasn't sure how to ask the question he had about Loki. He didn't have the words for whatever that was--and he wouldn't, not for years. But there were other questions, the way there always were at the end of their time in Narnia. So he pushed back the stuff about Loki, and thought about all those people, and said, "Are the Narnians going to be okay?"

"Some will settle in Archenland. Others will find the North no longer suits them, and will go to live in Calormen or other places. Only some of the youngest will live to see the end of the Witch's winter; and of those, only a few will ever visit Narnia again," said Aslan, which was a little surprising, since Bucky had figured he was about as likely to tell them to mind their own business.

"What about Shona? And the other Lion?" Bucky said, not so much because he thought he needed to, as because Aslan had paused, and sometimes seemed to like to be asked.

"The girl will be one of those who returns, nearly a hundred years from today. The Lion is even now being taken to the Witch's house, where he will remain until all are freed again."

The way he said it made Bucky think he didn't have to ask about Shona's family, because they were probably covered under 'all.' The pause that came after he said it was different than the last one. It felt final, the kind of pause that gave you the idea that question time was over. In the end, that was probably a good thing, because the answer he'd gotten was already going to be on Bucky's mind for a while. A hundred years might not sound like a long time to Loki, but it sure was to a guy like him. The horror of growing old while your family stayed the same--it was the kind of thing that could give you nightmares.

"Well, that seems to have turned out all right," Loki said philosophically. "But perhaps you can refrain from _stabbing me_ , the next time."

Aslan's laugh was still roaring in Bucky's ears when he blinked, and found himself somewhere else. For a second, he was a little dizzy, the way he usually was in the seconds after he fell from one world into another. Then everything around him slowed down and started to make sense. He was standing just inside his family's apartment, having just come in from spending most of a Saturday trying to keep Steve from getting in trouble (or being his partner in crime, if you asked most of the grownups on their block). He'd walked through plenty of slush on his way back, so even though he wasn't very cold, he was dripping. Something smelled good from the kitchen, and he could hear Becca talking fast, the way she did when she was excited about something. It was a good smell, and, after the last couple days, a really good sound.

Bucky hung up his coat, then snuck into his room before anyone could notice he was home. He lifted up the loose floorboard under his bed, and laid the new knife on top of all the other ones. He looked at them for a minute, his heart twisting in a way he was just starting to understand and be even more afraid of. Then he went to hug Becca and get back to eating his parents out of house and home.


	3. In the Garden

It was beautiful, there in the dark.

Bucky couldn't actually see anything, not even his hands in front of his face, but he still knew that much right away. And the way he knew it was because of the song, which had started a second or two after he got there. No one could have heard it without knowing it could never have been sung in any ugly place. If you had ever heard it for yourself, you might even have suspected it was the source from which all other beauty came.

Bucky had once heard the first note or two of a song like this one, during a dream he'd had when he was a kid. The dream had turned out not to be a dream after all, but he'd never thought he'd get to hear more of that song. Now he was here again, listening to it, and he knew beyond any doubt that it was all real.

That knowing would have been the best thing about it if it hadn't been for the other thing Bucky knew, which was that he wasn't listening to it alone. He couldn't have said why he was so sure of that. There was no light to see by, and neither of them had bumped into the other, nor dared to interrupt the song. But still, there could be no doubt that Loki was there, hearing it with him, just like he had been there for those first few notes that other time.

*

The song went on for a while, though Bucky couldn't have said for exactly how long. It could have been minutes or hours or anything in-between. 

Then the song began to change, and as it did, other things started changing, too. Stars light up the sky, familiar constellations blinking into existence all around them; and if there had been any lingering doubt as to whether they were in Narnia, it was gone by the time the sun came over the horizon for the very first time.

Now that there was light to see by, everything else seemed both to happen all at once and to take forever. Hills and mountains rose to all sides. Grass grew under their feet, spreading out over everything. Trees and bushes and all manners of flowers followed, sprouting up in the high places and the low places alike. Channels and divots cracked the earth, and water rose up within them, creating streams that led to rivers that led to lakes and--

Far to the east, the ocean filled with these and other waters, a swell so great Bucky could hear it clearly what must have been fifty or a hundred miles away from the nearest beach. The ground rumbled under his feet until it was done.

The song changed again, one last time. These notes were wilder and more unpredictable than what had come before--as if the beginning and middle of the song were related to something you had heard before, and it was only the end that was truly new. And what happened now was not something that Bucky ever could have predicted, at least not the same way you could predict that a new world will have a sun and stars, mountains and trees, rivers and oceans.

In the ground by his feet grew a little mound, and then another, and another. For a second, Bucky thought these would be more trees or shrubs, maybe--but then the first mound burst open, and something darted out of it, between his feet and away. By the time he'd turned to see where it was going (but not what it was, for it had been an extremely quick, shadowy thing, and there was quite a lot of cover by the tangled place in which they stood), and then turned back, the other mounds were breaking open, too. It didn't make sense until it did, which was when something flew out of one of the mounds, rising into the sky as a dry brown powder drifted down from its feathers. It was a bird, a sparrow, and soon it was joined by many others. Hundreds, maybe thousands, visible for miles and miles around them, even as more shadows--mice and shrews and voles and squirrels and that sort of thing, mostly--dashed for the bushes or the trees and safety.

There were a few larger mounds here or there, none very close to where they were standing. From one there came a bear; from a circle of five mounds came a wolf-pack; and here and there came deer of a few different kinds. There were mounds much smaller than the large mounds and larger than the small ones, from which emerged creatures such as badgers and possums and rabbits, and larger birds such as hawks and falcons. But the number of large and medium mounds, while not insignificant, paled in comparison to the number of smaller mounds.

Later, Bucky would decide that it all made very good sense when it came to the ecosystem. For now he watched, and was delighted; for now he listened, and felt calmer than he had in his own world in some time.

Finally, when it had been minutes or longer since the last new mound had appeared, the song finally wound down. And when it was gone, Bucky found that he didn't miss it. Or at least, he didn't regret that it had stopped, maybe because the end of the song didn't feel like an ending. It felt like a beginning. It felt like the way a really good day feels when you wake up to it...or, maybe, the way a really good place feels when it wakes up to you.

"Wow," Bucky said, when the last notes had faded all the way away, and he'd looked over to his right to find Loki exactly where he'd known he would be, before he'd even been able to check. "That was really something."

"Yes," Loki said.

Bucky hadn't realized how far he could see while the song was going on. Now, he looked around, and realized that his sight had narrowed again. He couldn't see across whole mountain ranges, all the way to the sea; now he was limited to the snow-covered peaks surrounding the valley they were in, and limited even further by the fact that a lot of the trees had gotten pretty mature over the course of the song. It brought him back down to earth. It was a feeling he didn't usually get until he'd been sent back home.

It was a feeling that made him swallow, and look out over what he could see of that valley, and come out with the news he hadn't decided he was going to share before that moment.

"So, uh," he said. "I enlisted."

"--Enlisted in what?" Loki asked.

*

"I thought you said your realm wasn't involving itself in that war," Loki said a minute later. So far, his reaction seemed pretty okay. Better, at least, than mom and Becca's crying and worrying. It was too early to say if it was better than Steve's reaction, but Bucky figured it pretty much had to be. Loki wasn't too likely to try to join up twice in the next week and end up out on his ass both times.

"We are now," Bucky said, and didn't really have the energy to get into all the ins and outs of the whole thing. Anyway, he had the idea, whenever he was trying to explain Earth politics to Loki or Loki was trying to explain Asgardian politics to him, that a lot went missing somewhere in the middle.

"And you _chose_ to involve yourself in this." The icy tone in Loki's voice was Bucky's first clue his reaction might not be better so much as different. "You weren't conscripted. You _volunteered_."

"Pretty much."

"By the Norns, _why_? Have you taken a blow to the head since last we saw one another? Or have you merely become a fool in the interim? Why would you do such a thing?"

Because it had only been a matter of time before he got drafted, Bucky could have said. Because people were already starting to ask why you hadn't joined up, if you were young and able-bodied. Because he could have taken everyone else thinking he was a coward, but not if Steve had gotten around to thinking the same thing. But none of that was the real reason.

"I had to," he said, simply. "It was the right thing to do."

If Loki remembered any of the things Bucky had told him about what he'd read in the papers, the awful things happening an ocean away, he didn't say anything about it. He was too busy working up to a tear. "You cannot sit a horse. You can hardly draw a sword without fumbling it. You're lucky if your arrows come within half a mile of wherever you've aimed them. You are, in fact, hopelessly incompetent with every weapon I've ever seen you hold. You cannot run any reasonable distance without being winded. You--"

"Gee, thanks," Bucky said. "You know, you might have a hard time believing it, but I've been known to walk and breathe at the same time. Sometimes, if I really get lucky, I can even manage to hold up my half of a conversation."

Loki didn't seem impressed, nevermind chastened. "You are a _mortal."_

"Yeah, so?"

"So, mortals go to war and die. By the hundreds. By the thousands. You'll hardly stand a chance without me by your side."

"Aw, I'm touched," Bucky said, and even if he sort of was underneath the sarcasm, mostly what he wanted was for Loki to stop talking. Unfortunately, the thing about Loki finally going off was that it usually meant he was going to be going off for a while unless someone managed to distract him.

"What do you expect me to do the next time I arrive in this world? Do you suppose I'll wait for you even longer than usual, on the off chance you've managed to survive your puny little war? Well, I won't. You may be certain of that much."

"Aw, I'm less touched."

"I'll simply have to perform the next task, whatever it is, on my own. It may be somewhat more difficult without your slight assistance, but I'm sure I'll manage. And the glory for my deeds, when it comes, will belong to me alone."

"What glory?" Bucky asked. They'd never really gotten much of that. Even when they heard stories that sounded sort of like something that they'd been involved with, they were never mentioned in them. No one ever seemed to recognize their names, even from the times when they'd been feasted after doing whatever they'd done.

But before he could try to get Loki sidetracked into complaining about how they never arrived in Narnia to find a statue had been erected in their honor, and how insulting the lack really was, they both got sidetracked by something else.

A rustling sound came from somewhere nearby, so that they both paused to listen. Just when Bucky had decided it must have been nothing, and Loki had opened his mouth, it came again. 

About twenty feet away, there was a group of bushes that were thicker and more opaque than they had been five minutes ago. When the rustling sound came for the third time, the leaves on one of the bushes shook a little, and there was a hint of shadowy movement.

"What do you think it is?" Bucky asked in a low voice.

"Something big," Loki said.

Bucky tried to think what they'd seen pop up from the ground anywhere near here that had been as big as this looked. But he couldn't think of anything. Whatever this was, it was as big as an elk, or a bear, and all of those that he'd seen had been well to the north.

Bucky ran through the options real quick, the way you get used to doing when you end up having to make a lot of split-second decisions during adventures. Running was a bad idea, when they didn't know what they'd be running from, whether it would chase them, or even how fast it was. It was a worse idea when you also considered that they were downwind of it, so that it wouldn't matter how well they hid in the thickening underbrush if whatever-it-was had any kind of nose at all.

"Got a spare knife?" Bucky asked.

"I'm no longer certain you're capable of wielding one."

Before Bucky could argue the point, or tell him to stop being an asshole about it, Loki was gone, ducking forward into the shadows so that Bucky's choices were to either follow him, or stand in the middle of the clearing and wait to get mauled.

"Asshole," Bucky said, and followed him.

In the end, it turned out they needn't have gone to all the trouble of trying to get closer to the thing--for they'd only gone perhaps fifteen feet when something stepped out of the shadows and into the sunlight. It was just as big as its shadow had looked, and then some. It wasn't an elk or a bear or even a moose. 

As much as Bucky has seen when he'd been able to see all the way to the sea, he must have missed some things, for the creature that stood there was a Centaur. There was no doubt, from the dried earth that caked the Centaur's entire body, from his horse legs and flanks to his human-looking chest and stomach, that he must have come up just like the rest.

"Huh," Bucky said. 

He straightened up, not too worried about being charged anymore. All the Centaurs he'd ever heard of had been on the side of good, and none of the ones he'd ever heard of had been prone to random attacks.

They were still pretty intimidating, though. Bucky and Loki had had more than one hushed argument about who was going to be the one to ask a Centaur a question. Usually Bucky ended up doing it, though somehow it never made asking the _next_ Centaur a question any less intimidating.

This time, though, there was something different. Bucky couldn't figure out what it was, at least not at first.

"Horses may like me better, but horse men seem to prefer you," said Loki, right on cue.

By now, the Centaur had seen them, and had not so much frozen as paused in place. He tilted his head to the side in a very un-Centaurlike way, and then said, in an uncertain voice that was even less like any Centaur they'd ever met, "Hello?"

"Hi there," Bucky said, and now he got what the difference was. He hadn't noticed at first because at first all there had been to notice was _big_. But now that he was looking, he could see that even if this Centaur was just as tall as the ones they'd met previously, he was a lot skinnier than any of them--not in a way that suggested he didn't have enough to eat, but in one that suggested he hadn't had the chance to fill out yet. His chin was smooth with no beard in sight, and although Bucky never would have noticed this part without noticing the other things first, his horse half was also more on the lanky side. This was a much younger Centaur than any they'd met before, which made sense considering how new the rest of the world was, too. "I'm Bucky, and this is Loki."

" _Prince_ Loki," Loki corrected.

"I am," said the Centaur, and paused again. "--I _believe I am_ the first of my kind, or one of the first. I do not yet have a name, or at least not one known to me."

As he said this, he began to somehow look more confident in what he was saying; and yet, at the same time, seemed somehow less certain. It was as if he were repeating something he had been told rather than something he knew from having experienced it firsthand.

"Nice to meet you," Bucky said, before Loki could say anything stupid. Then, because the Centaur still seemed so unsure, he said, "Can we help you with something?"

"Do you perhaps know where 'east' might be?" asked the Centaur in a rush, looking relieved. "I am to meet someone near it, by a place known as the Sea."

Bucky thought about this a second, then for another second while he figured out how to explain it to someone who had (probably) just become a person today. "East isn't really a place. It's a direction. It's the way the sun comes up every morning. Today, it came up over those mountains. If you were on the other side of the mountains, it would come up over something else, but always from that same direction. Get it?"

"I believe I do. Thank you," said the Centaur, and turned to go.

"We could come with you," Bucky said.

" _Bucky_ ," Loki said in a low, annoyed tone, the kind he got when he didn't want to do something and didn't have any ideas for smoothly getting himself out of whatever it was (or, sometimes, because he'd taken the opposite of a shine to someone Bucky liked. That was just the kind of contrary guy he could be, especially over the last few years).

"Unless you think we'll slow you down," Bucky continued, because even if the Centaur didn't seem too confident, the fact that he was a Centaur meant he'd be a hell of a lot faster than them once he got used to his feet.

"I would welcome your company," said the Centaur solemnly. "I have not experienced such a thing as company before (though it is of course my first day)."

*

Walking through this new world might have been intimidating with any other Centaur--but this Centaur was just as new as everything else, and didn't seem to be in a hurry, so it was more of a stroll than anything else. Sometimes they'd pass a pine tree or something and the Centaur would ask them what it was, and they would tell him; other times, they wouldn't know, and the Centaur would mutter a word under his breath, as if he were the one naming the thing. And maybe he was, for later Centaurs were as much scholars and healers as they were prophets. Everyone has to start somewhere, Bucky figured.

After Bucky had failed to name a lethal-looking purple flower, Loki said, "I don't know what it's called. They have no such plant in my world (believe me, I've looked). But I do happen to know what it does." He paused for dramatic effect.

"And what does it do, pray tell?" asked the Centaur, who hadn't been around Loki long enough to be wise to his dramatic pauses yet.

"When imbibed, it grants true visions. Though only to those with a gift for prophecy, of course. Which makes it useless to us--oh, but you're a Centaur, aren't you?"

Bucky rolled his eyes. But the Centaur asked, "What do you mean?"

"You may not know this yet, but your kind are widely known for their prophetic gifts."

"Yeah, by talking to the stars," Bucky said. "Not seeing a lot of those out right now."

"That's the most common method we've heard of. It hardly means it's the only one. Wouldn't it be nice to know if there were another?"

"I _do_ feel as if I ought to know more," the Centaur agreed.

And that was how all three of them ended up chewing on the flowers, though not until after Bucky got Loki to swear up, down, and sideways that it only _looked_ lethal. They only tasted the petals, for Loki claimed the rest was both disgusting and useless. The texture and taste was something like clover, except more purple, somehow. It didn't make Bucky feel any different, and it was pretty obvious that Loki didn't, either. The Centaur, though, soon seemed to slow down, and to sway from side to side, not as if he might fall over, but as if he were thinking too far and deeply for anything else.

"What are you trying to do, anyway?" Bucky asked, while they kept an eye on the Centaur (and stood a good few feet away, on the off chance he fell to one side).

Loki shrugged. "We've never had a prophecy before. I thought it was worth the attempt."

About half the other times they'd talked to Centaurs, it had been because Loki wanted to know if there was anything written in the Narnian skies about them. Stories got told up there, and he figured that if anyone was going to know about them, it would definitely be the stars. 

It did make sense, sort of. Every now and then, they'd hear a story about other people who'd come to Narnia from another world, so it wasn't like everyone who showed up here from somewhere else got forgotten. The thing that Loki never seemed to acknowledge was that those people always ended up ruling Narnia, or saving the whole country, or both. Bucky had never ruled anything, and if Loki ever did, it wasn't going to be here. So it wasn't really surprising that no one had ever heard of them, especially since they didn't use their real names half the time, or stay around long enough to really get to know anyone except each other. But still, even though Bucky never really expected much recognition, Loki seemed to be itching for it whenever the subject came up.

"Sure," Bucky said. He could have argued more about it, but there didn't really seem to be a point. The Centaur had already eaten the flowers, and it wasn't like Bucky had tried all that hard to convince him otherwise. Whatever was going to happen, was going to happen.

The Centaur kept swaying. The swaying began to slow, a process so glacial that when he became completely still, you would have thought it had happened all at once unless you had been paying very close attention all the while. His eyes, which had been closed, snapped open wide. He was no less thin and gangly than he'd been a few minutes before, and no less covered in dirt, but somehow seemed much more like the kinds of Centaurs they had met before than he had before. He was majestic, and stern, and somehow you found yourself dreading whatever might come out of his mouth, because you couldn't guarantee you would like it, but you knew it would be true.

"Loki Odinson," he said. "Bucky Barnes. You wish to know what awaits you in this land of Narnia. What power, what acclaim. You desire to be told what is and will be written of you in the grandeur of our skies."

"Uh," Bucky said.

"More or less," said Loki.

"You believe that the heavens must already have learned of you, if I know of these things, if I am speaking of them to you. But it is not so. You are known neither by name nor by deed. The stars, who speak endlessly of all that must someday come to pass, have said nothing of you. You are as unseen as you are unknown, hidden from the skies by some dark or bright power.

"I do not know how or why you were brought to Narnia, or what great or evil deeds you might commit. Perhaps I will ask Aslan, when I meet him in the East."

So saying, the Centaur shook his head, the same way a horse might, and then fell silent. Then his eyes closed and his head drooped, until his chin rested on his chest. A single snore erupted from him, and it was soon apparent that he was in the middle of what was perhaps the first nap ever taken in that land.

"Charming," said Loki, looking a little pissed and a lot rattled. Whatever he'd been looking to hear, it hadn't been that.

"Good going," Bucky said. "Nice to know we might be evil. That's just great."

"Surely it would be better than to be so insignificant as to be unworthy of mention," Loki said, which went a long way to explaining why he looked pissed. Then, more thoughtfully, he said, "He knew our full names."

"So?"

"So, even if the stars know nothing about us (presuming, of course, that there's any truth to what he said), someone must."

"Centaurs don't lie," Bucky said, to whom it was so manifestly obvious that there was at least one person in Narnia who knew all about them that he didn't feel the need to comment on the rest.

"Not in latter days. Who knows about now?"

"I think if the first ever Centaur was a liar, the rest would have a different reputation," Bucky said. It was the kind of thing that might or might not have been true at home, but felt like it had to be here. Narnia was like that, making things simple that would have been much more complicated if they'd happened anywhere else.

The thing about Loki was that he wasn't simple, though, no matter how much everything around them might be. A series of emotions passed across his face, only about half of which Bucky was sure what they were. Then he said, so lightly it was anything but, "Unless the very first one were a very _good_ liar."

Bucky couldn't help it, and rolled his eyes. "Maybe you could give him lessons when he wakes back up."

*

A while later, they were still waiting for the Centaur to wake up. 

They had found the flowers by a little stream, through which ran the clearest, loveliest water Bucky had ever tasted. (Loki claimed he'd had better at home, but then again, Loki always said that, like he thought being too impressed by anything that happened outside of Asgard was beneath him.) Flies buzzed around somewhere nearby, but didn't fly over to bother them. The trees had kept growing, too slow to see it happening, but steady nonetheless; half an hour ago, Bucky had swung his legs over a branch just a foot or two off the ground, but now his knees were at around the same height as Loki's eyes.

"My father means to announce his successor next week," Loki said. He had a knife in his hands, and was gazing down at it thoughtfully. He'd been leaning against the same tree for at least twenty minutes, but hadn't fidgeted at all. Maybe it was easier to adjust yourself when you weren't sitting on the thing that kept changing on you. "He claims to be weary, no longer interested in ruling."

"Oh yeah? What do you think your chances are?"

Loki's scowl was pretty close to an answer, and not a very surprising one. For the first few years, whenever they'd met, he'd been full of talk about how he was obviously the superior choice. Then things had started to change. He'd started talking less about the kind of king he would be, and more about how awful Thor was, and how bad he'd be at the job. It definitely gave the impression that he knew the wind wasn't blowing in the direction he wanted it to.

Now, he said, "If that oaf becomes king, Asgard will be in ruins within a century. Mark my words. He's brash, and impulsive, and laughably easy to manipulate."

"Which you know because you do it all the time," said Bucky dryly. Maybe his brother was as bad as he said he was, or maybe he wasn't, but the way Loki talked, you got the impression Thor could have been the best person in the universe and Loki still wouldn't have been able to figure out anything good to say about him.

"And he always falls for it. Just last year, when we went to Alfheim--"

And Loki was off on a story, which involved a hunt for an imaginary beast, and a potion made from the spikes of a real one, and how hilarious it had been when Thor barged into someone else's wedding feast on the trail of one of Loki's illusions, waving his hammer around and causing an inter-realm incident their dad had had to smooth over.

"It wasn't even a proper glamour," Loki said. "Merely a shadow. Any imbecile would have realized it was no real creature."

"Except your drugged brother and all the screaming wedding guests," Bucky said. "Sure."

Loki made a face. "The _point_ is that Thor is clearly unfit for rule. If he can so readily allow himself to be deceived by me, who's to say he won't allow himself to be deceived by another? Someone who wouldn't have the best interests of Asgard at heart? Clearly, the throne must go to one too clever to fall for such a ruse."

"I don't know if your dad's going to see it that way," Bucky said, partly because he knew it was normal in both their worlds for the oldest son of a king to end up the next king, but partly because he'd met enough kings to wonder whether Loki would really be a very good one (not that he'd ever have said as much, no matter how annoying Loki's ranting got sometimes).

"I can't see why he wouldn't. He's always said we were both born to rule. What else could he have meant?"

"I have no idea," Bucky said honestly, and noticed that his feet were now at the same level as Loki's hairline. He was going to need to jump back down, either now or pretty soon. "If I were you, though, I'd try to come up with a plan B. You know, just in case it doesn't go your way."

Bucky was too busy gauging the distance from the tree branch to the ground to notice the expression that passed over Loki's face then. If he had, he would surely have figured out that Loki had already come up with a plan B, and that whatever it was, it was probably a lot nastier than what he'd gotten up to in Alfheim. As it was, the thing he noticed, once he'd gotten his feet as close to the ground as he could before letting go, was that Loki's expression looked kind of distant, like he was somewhere far away, or thinking really hard. He wasn't holding the knife anymore, either, and his hands were balled into fists. For a second, Bucky would have assumed he'd disappeared it, much the same way he'd appeared it in the first place; then light glanced off something by Loki's feet, and Bucky looked down and saw that Loki had driven the knife into the ground, nearly up to the hilt.

"Huh," Bucky said.

He might have pushed Loki on what that was about, except that then a long, loud sigh came from ten or fifteen feet away, where they'd left the Centaur. In the time he'd been asleep, little green vines had started twisting up around his ankles. They weren't thick or terribly strong vines, like the sort you might have read of in one horror story or another; they were, instead, easily shaken off, so that all the Centaur had to do was pick up his feet one by one to be freed.

"That was--very strange," he said, and looked somehow older than he had before. "I think perhaps such blooms were not intended for my kind."

"Perhaps it was a lesson best learned early," said Loki, smooth as smooth could be.

"...Perhaps," said the Centaur. "Though I find I doubt your intent on this matter."

"I'd doubt it for everything else, too," Bucky said cheerfully, because it was either rag on Loki, or dwell on the troubles they'd brought with them from their own worlds.

"Be that as it may, East I have been summoned, and Eastward I must go--and with haste. For the one who called me came to me in my sleep, and bade me come to him swiftly. There is much work to be done already, here on this first day."

"Does he want us to go with you?" Bucky asked, and didn't have to ask who 'he' was. In Narnia, you always had a sense about when people were talking about Aslan, even when they didn't say his name.

"I did not ask. He did not say," said the Centaur. "Do as you will."

So saying, he shook himself, dislodging half a birds nest from atop his head (some small, fluttering bird had mistaken the curls of his head for the top of a tree, so still had he stood as he slept), and turned to the east. Then he was gone, his hoofbeats as swift and sure-footed as if there weren't hundreds or thousands of molehills everywhere, just waiting to be tripped on. (In fact, all the holes from which the animals had emerged had by now filled back in).

"Guess he didn't need us after all," Bucky said.

"What a shame," Loki said, in a way that said it really wasn't at all.

Abruptly and surprisingly cheered by the idea of Loki being keen to get him alone, even if it didn't mean what Bucky would have liked it to mean, Bucky had to agree.

*

After a perfunctory debate about it, they decided not to follow the Centaur. There didn't seem to be any reason to bother, since he hadn't been told to bring them; but the main reason, at least for Bucky, was that that prophecy had left him a little rattled. It was one thing to hear you weren't important, but another thing to hear that you may as well not exist. It was the kind of thing that could get a guy wondering what the point of anything was, if nothing you had ever done or ever would do actually mattered. It didn't seem like the kind of thought process that was going to be helpful in the Army.

Instead, they decided, they'd go west, following the setting sun (which was, for now, not anywhere near finished with its journey from one end of the sky to the other) until it was dark enough to make camp. If something or someone else came up, they'd deal with it when it did. 

The best thing about this plan was that they wouldn't have to worry about where to get dinner, or plan in any time for it to get done. Even in the short way they'd already walked with the Centaur, they'd seen bushes and bushes full of ripened blackberries, and tree after tree weighed down with rosy, soft-looking peaches. So they wouldn't have to go fishing, which was always cold and wet, with Bucky doing all the disgusting parts and Loki doing all the criticizing; and they wouldn't have to go hunting, which was always a little nerve wracking (somehow even more so when you hadn't seen any Talking animals around than when you had), not to mention exhausting, with even more disgusting parts; and, best of all, they wouldn't have to go hungry if neither fishing nor hunting worked out.

They were just about to start out again when Bucky spotted something and said, "Would you look at that?"

"What?"

"Your knife." 

The knife Loki had driven into the ground wasn't a knife anymore, or had become something more than a knife. The hilt was three times taller than it had been before. Though it was shaped largely the same as it had been before, it had become a more bronze color--except for the leaves which had sprouted from it, which were as green as the most well-maintained lawn you've ever seen, and somehow a thousand times more natural. Bucky got the idea they were pretty lethal, too; even from feet away, seeing them in the shade of the tree in which the knife-bush had been planted, you could tell they were as sharp as the blade-root from which they'd come.

"How odd," Loki said, and crouched down next to the bush. He put out his hand, slowly but not gingerly, and ran his finger over the nearest leaf--not touching it, but feeling the air above it, with the intense expression he only seemed to have when he was intent on a (usually magical) problem. Loki tended to have emotions in flashes, but when it came to magic he was always too focused on the thing in front of him to bother worrying about what he looked like.

And what he looked like was...Bucky had figured out what he felt about Loki a long time ago. He'd figured out what he wanted, and at the same time, figured out it wasn't going to happen. It wasn't going to happen back in Brooklyn, where he could get the shit beaten out of him or even killed if he got caught with another guy; it definitely wasn't going to happen in Narnia, where losing Loki as a friend would be a hell of a lot worse than potentially getting stabbed during the process.

But no matter how firmly Bucky held to that, there were still moments, when Loki was concentrating or laughing or asleep, or being even more obnoxious than usual. Moments when Bucky's heart did a little flip in his chest, and his face got hot, and the only thing he wanted to do more than push Loki into the nearest wall and kiss him senseless, was to keep watching him for as long as the moment lasted.

This one lasted for a while before Loki said, "I see." 

He glanced at Bucky, so fast and smooth (and still so beautiful) that Bucky had to look away, because there was no way there wasn't something amazingly incriminating on his face. When he looked back, a second later, Loki was looking at him quizzically. 

Loki being curious would probably have been the kiss of death in any other situation. But he was intent on what he was doing this time, too intent to bother asking. As soon as Bucky looked back, Loki held out his hand with a flourish, as if to include the bush, and the nearby trees, and everything.

"What's up?" Bucky said, because Loki liked to be asked, and giving in to the theatrics meant they could concentrate on that.

"Do you remember what I told you about creation magic, on the day we met?" 

"Uh, not really," said Bucky, who remembered plenty about that first visit, but nothing about that (though if he'd remembered a little more, he might have recalled that Loki hadn't said much about what he'd felt back then except that it felt new).

"Well, the world was new then. Here and now, the world is new still...or new again, however it's meant to work. What I felt then was promise; what I feel now is the promise's completion."

"Yeah, and?"

"Here and now, this world is filled with creation magic. It's bursting with it. As long as it remains, anything planted in its soil will grow into a shape and purpose compatible with this world."

"Oh, yeah?" Bucky had become so interested in this that he approached the bush for himself, and crouched down beside Loki to get a better look. He traced a finger over one of the other leaves, but unlike Loki, he made the mistake of touching it, and got a hell of a paper cut for his trouble. "Well," he said, sticking his finger into his mouth for a second, then popping it back out so he could finish his thought, "no one who goes camping out here is ever gonna need to pack a razor."

Loki was giving him a weird look. He did that sometimes, but a lot more often over the last few years than he had when they were kids. It was the kind of look where you weren't quite sure if he was about to get offended or something else.

It turned out to be something else, which was good, since Bucky had a cut on his finger to suck on, and didn't need to be worrying about getting a leaf in the ribs to boot.

"--I doubt you could shave with these," said Loki. "They're not nearly stiff enough." He made a weird coughing sound to go along with the weird look from before, and stood up. "Meanwhile. We did mean to go west, did we not?"

"Sure," Bucky said, and followed Loki in that direction, a little regretful to be leaving the strange new bush behind, and even more baffled at Loki's reaction to what had really been nothing more than a dumb joke.

*

They didn't get very far very fast, for although they weren't interrupted by anything else that could talk, every now and then they had to stop for important planting reasons. Bucky didn't have much on him other than change, which seemed boring, and his apartment key, which he'd need when he got back, and a few buttons, which if he tore them off he'd have to try to sew new ones on himself unless he wanted an extra trip over to his mom's (where there would be extra crying over him in addition to all the crying he already had to look forward to between now and when he shipped off to Basic). So in the end, it was up to Loki and his bag of tricks when it came to what to experiment with.

It ended up being a pretty good selection. They didn't bother planting any more knives, but the arrow tree was amazing, with branches that broke off in the perfect shape. The candle tree didn't look like much, at least not until Loki had lit a differently-colored flame on each of the wicks, something that was really neat looking in the middle of the day, and would probably be a thousand times better at night. The potion shrub was the weirdest of all, crooked and dark but supposedly not dangerous, even though it swayed back and forth without any wind blowing on it, and occasionally puffed out green or yellow smoke.

At some point, they started going up, an incline that wasn't anywhere near as steep as Bucky would have expected. At another point, long before they'd expected to, they started going back down again; without even trying, they'd found a pass between one high mountain peak and another. When they were through it, they came out into the greenest, most beautiful valley they could ever have imagined (or at least, than Bucky could have; Loki met the sight with some muttering that was probably about how his mother's garden was better), and the most beautiful thing about it was the lake.

Bucky hadn't realized how hot and sweaty he was until he saw it. He wasn't thirsty, for there had been many cool, clear streams to drink out of throughout the day...but seeing how blue the water of the lake was, all he could think of was how much he wanted to swim in it.

"Race you," he said to Loki, and took off running down the slope leading to the lake.

He had the lead for about two seconds before Loki passed him--but Loki wasn't in the lead for too long, because the lake was bigger than it looked, and distance from them to the water's edge was shorter than expected. In just a couple minutes, they were at the edge of the water, stripping out of their clothes as quickly as possible to get in the water faster. (Bucky could have snuck a look, or maybe a few, but didn't. He knew what Loki's body looked like, and as weird as it might have sounded to anyone else, had long since gotten over any awkwardness.)

Loki was faster at everything, and so he made it into the water while Bucky was still stepping out of his pants.

"How is it?" Bucky asked.

"The water's fine," Loki said. "A little warmer than I'd prefer, but otherwise excellent."

Freezing, Bucky translated. Definitely freezing. So cold there should've been a layer of ice on top of it, no matter how warm the rest of the day was, or how bright the sun. 

He braced himself, waded in, and found the water was indeed cold enough to whoosh the breath out of a person--but not quite cold enough for him to need to get back out. After a minute, he'd adjusted to it, and found the water was as fine as Loki had said.

They swam for a while, floated lazily for a longer while, then, around the time the sun looked like it was about to start its descent, climbed back out. They lay on the grass, letting the sun dry them since Loki didn't have anything useful like a towel tucked away, and not knowing how cold it would get overnight, neither of them wanted to go to risk having to sleep in wet clothes.

When they were dry, and dressed, Bucky said, "Where do we want to set up camp?"

By the lake would have been good by him, especially since they hadn't seen anything dangerous on their way there. But it was true that they were right out in the open, which wasn't the best idea when you were on the kind of adventure they tended to end up on, and so he wasn't that surprised when Loki looked around and said, "Atop the hill, perhaps."

Hills still left you out in the open, but looking at this one again, Bucky saw what Loki had already seen: That the hill was steep enough that it would take some effort to climb, which meant they'd see anyone trying to climb it while they were awake, and almost certainly hear anyone who tried to climb it while they slept (or at least Loki would; he heard a lot better than Bucky did). 

"Works for me," he said.

So they made their way over, and climbed up. By now, the sun was on its way down, so even though the climb was hard work, and went on long enough for Bucky's shirt to start clinging to him again, it wasn't warm enough to get him wondering why they'd bothered swimming in the first place.

At the top of the hill, they turned around and looked back at the way they'd come. It was darker than it had been, dusk heading into night. A ways off, they could see a sparkling of colors, green and gold and red and orange and blue: the candle-tree, still burning somewhere in the wilderness.

*

The top of the hill was flat and wide. They set up camp in the middle, which was not nearly as unpleasant a prospect as camping could be, for not only was the grass so soft and plush that it could not have been too terribly uncomfortable to sleep on, but Loki had remembered the bedrolls. They were much thicker and plusher than the grass, and much more comfortable than any sleeping-bag you may have used, for Loki had commissioned them himself from a tailor in Vanaheim.

"Thought we lost these that time with the Harpies," Bucky said. Their whole cliff-side camp had fallen into a deep, deep gorge. He and Loki had almost fallen after them. It hadn't been one of their better adventures.

"These are new," Loki said, not sounding very interested.

Bucky was interested, though. He found himself examining the bedrolls carefully, and coming to the conclusion that they couldn't have been the same ones. They'd used the first set for weeks, and they'd been torn and stained in various places. All of which was the kind of thing you _could_ fix with magic, but that Loki probably wouldn't have bothered with. Especially without a really obvious reason to lie about it. Still, though, the fabric felt the same, and smelled the same way the other bedrolls had, the entire time they'd used them. If Bucky had even noticed the smell the last time, he'd have thought it was a newness smell; now, he thought that maybe it was magic. A Loki smell.

Eventually, he looked up to find Loki watching him with a kind of intense expression.

"What?"

Loki smiled, one of his rare real ones, the intense expression fading away so fast it may as well have never been there at all. "It never fails to astonish me how easily fascinated you are by the most mundane of objects."

" _Magic_ objects," Bucky said, in his own defense.

"The most boring ones imaginable." Loki made a light, and then another, pale green flames that would float above them and glow more brightly the darker it got. "You'd sniff the bedrolls for half the night before you'd remember we've had nothing for dinner."

They'd grazed on peaches and blackberries all afternoon, but then they'd spent an hour or even a few in the lake. Now that Loki mentioned it, Bucky was definitely hungry. Starving, even. 

"Got any more of those peaches?" he asked, not because he thought Loki might--Loki wasn't at all practical when it came to how they were going to eat in Narnia, which was why Bucky had had to learn about rabbit skinning and fish gutting in the first place--but because it was definitely possible that Loki could use his magic to bring some to them, instead of either of them having to go back down the hill in the dark.

"Better than that," Loki said, and with a flourish pulled out something round and shining.

It was an apple. Even in the greenness of that light, Bucky could tell that it wasn't a yellow apple, nor one so light green as to be mistaken for such in that light. No, this apple was golden, as pure and polished as if it had been made out of the real thing. 

As soon as Bucky saw it, he wanted it for himself. He wanted it so much that he knew he still would have even if he'd just stuffed himself during one of those amazing Narnian feasts.He wanted it so badly that there was nothing to do but ball his hands up, and put them behind his back, and say, "What the hell is that?"

"It's an...apple?" Loki said, with an impression of bafflement that would have been pretty convincing for anyone who hadn't known to watch for the second where his face did that thing. "Surely they have them in your world. Even if they don't, you've had them in Narnia before. I'm certain of it. Remember when we stumbled upon that overgrown orchard? You practically gorged yourself--"

"Cut the shit," said Bucky, more sure than ever that something was up.

Loki looked at him. Innocence that faded into flatness that faded into annoyance and then a serious look that might have been real. "Will you not trust me?"

"Nope."

"I wish you would."

"I just bet you do."

"If I tell you its intended result, it may not work. Thus defeating the purpose," Loki said. 

Peering at him in lighting that was greener and greener by the moment, Bucky figured he was most likely telling the truth. But that still wasn't a good reason to do it. "Which is?"

Instead of answering, Loki tossed the apple at his face. Bucky caught it, and knew right away he'd made a mistake. But it didn't seem that important, because now that the apple was right below his nose, he could smell it. It smelled better than any apple he'd ever tasted--better than anything he'd ever tasted. It fit into his hand more perfectly than any earlier apple, and was more apple-shaped than any of them. It was like the perfect idea of an apple, the one all the other got compared to (and found lacking, probably).

"Loki," he said, but he couldn't look away from the apple in his hand. "C'mon."

"Humor me in this. Please."

Loki never said please. He'd been known to say, 'Don't make me ask,' in a way that gave you the impression that he thought asking you not to make him ask counted as begging. But he never, ever said please.

In the end, maybe that was why Bucky didn't throw the apple away. He could have. Even with it there, right in front of him, he knew he could. The smell of the apple, the weight of it in his hand, they made him want, but the want didn't control him. If anyone else had wanted him to eat an apple like this, he would never even have considered it. But this was Loki. As weaselly as he could be, Bucky really did trust him. Maybe it was stupid, especially after the stupid shit that had already gone down earlier in the day. But he did.

"Okay," Bucky said. "But whatever happens, I'm holding you responsible."

"Done."

Loki passed him a little paring knife, no less fancy than any of the other souvenirs he'd given Bucky, even though this one wasn't made for sticking holes in other people. Though he sometimes liked peeling apples, seeing how much of the skin he could get off in one long, curling piece, Bucky tucked the knife into his pocket.

He brought the apple up to his mouth, and bit down. If the apple had looked like the platonic ideal of an apple, it tasted even better than that. Just the right mix of tart and sweet, and just the right amount of crunchy (for after all, there's nothing worse than a mushy apple). By the time he took a second and third bite, he'd found that it was also juicier than any apple he'd had before, and that a trickle of that juice was running down his forearm. Maybe he should have been self-conscious about it, especially with how closely Loki was watching him eat, but instead of anything like that, he felt...

There was a warmth that spread through him, each time he swallowed a bite of the apple. Down to his stomach and fingers and toes. And he found everything seemed clearer, even though it was dark, even though he still couldn't see much outside of the circle of light from Loki's flames. For a second or two, he thought he could see every blade of grass on the hill; thought that if he'd been standing close to the edge instead of sitting across from Loki in the middle, he could have seen for miles. And he could hear better, too, hear small feet shuffling miles away, and hear the sweep of an owl's silent wings from even farther. He could feel and hear and almost even see the blood running through his veins, through Loki's. For a moment, he could almost see and hear and feel something else, the one thing that had always been beyond him no matter how much he'd tried, how much he'd practiced, how much Loki had dumbed down the theories behind magic to him--

When he was about two-thirds of the way through the apple, the feeling stopped. He was back in himself. Even the apple was just an apple, though still prettier than any other apple Bucky had ever seen. Later, he'd think maybe everything was a little clearer, maybe everything was a little louder. For now, he just looked at the apple, and wondered why, if that warm feeling had gone away, he didn't somehow feel disappointed.

"That's weird," he said.

"--What is?" Loki asked, sharply enough that Bucky suddenly remembered that he had an ulterior motive here, and still hadn't said what it was.

"It's just an apple," Bucky said. "It seemed like more than that, before. Now it's just normal."

Loki relaxed enough for it to be obvious how tense he'd been before. Maybe he had been the whole time, or maybe only when he'd thought something might have gone wrong. 

"Hmm," he said. "Finish it anyway, if you would."

In for a penny, in for a pound. Bucky finished the apple, right down to the core. He looked at it. It was identical to every other apple core he'd ever thrown away.

"Huh," he said, and wondered what would happen.

He got up, walked a few feet, then crouched down and grabbed a handful of that short, soft grass. It came up easily in his hand, and he found the soil beneath it was just as soft as everywhere they'd planted.

"What are you doing?" Loki said. "Don't do that."

Bucky ignored him and kept digging, until the hole in front of him looked like it was probably deep enough. Then he set the apple core in it, and swiped the dirt back in to cover it.

"That apple was from my mother's garden," Loki said when Bucky came back. "It is proprietary."

"Maybe you should have thought about that before you gave it to me."

"Well, perhaps it won't grow. They're not meant to thrive in any other soil."

They watched for a few minutes, the light from the flames stretching just far enough for them to see the unturned earth. A few minutes should have been long enough; everything else they'd planted had started sprouting right away, even though nothing else had had seeds. 

But nothing happened.

All of a sudden, Bucky was as tired as he'd ever been in his life. Eating that apple had taken more out of him than any of the rest of the day--and it had been a very long day, in which he'd been up for half of his day, then thrown into a new world and been up since dawn, and spent most of his time since then traipsing around in the mountains. He'd been going to press Loki for more information, but now he was just too tired.

"You're gonna have to tell me what kind of apple that was tomorrow," he said, just after he crawled into his bedroll, and just before he closed his eyes. 

"Perhaps I will and perhaps I won't," said Loki, which was just typical, but Bucky wasn't awake long enough after that to argue.

*

The first thing Bucky knew was that there was the most delicious smell coming from somewhere. The second thing he knew was when he opened his eyes, and saw the tree. 

"Hey, it worked," he said.

But before he could get up and head over there to see just what kind of apple tree they'd ended up with, a strained voice said, "Don't move."

If there was one thing you learned from having adventures in another world with a friend from a third one, it was when you needed to do what that friend told you to do. From the tone in Loki's voice, this was one of those times.

"What's wrong?"

"It's watching us. And it's much too large for comfort."

"What is?"

"--You may as well sit up if you wish to see anything. But do it slowly."

Bucky did, going as slowly as he had the time they'd decided to creep into a dragon's lair to steal its treasure (Loki'd had a bullshit story he'd tried to sell Bucky on, but stealing treasure was really what it had been). Just as slowly, he looked to one side and then the other. 

Everything had changed at the top of that hill. The night before, it had been flat and empty, nothing growing on it but the thick green grass. Now they were in the middle of what could only be called a garden, which was surrounded by a wall made out of green turf. 

There were several dozen trees with them inside the wall. They were all tall and strong-looking, and somehow you could tell they were all still growing. Not far from where they'd slept, there was even a fountain, but even with the trickling of the water, the garden seemed somehow a thousand times quieter than it had been before.

As for the tree Bucky had planted, when he looked up at it, he saw that it was already loaded down with apples of its own--only these were silver, instead of gold, and the smell coming off them was subtly different.

"What the hell kind of apple was that?" Bucky said.

"Shhhh. Look up. _Slowly_."

Bucky looked. There, in the highest branches of what he was already coming to think of as his tree was a bird. It was big. No, more like huge. More importantly, its beak and talons were also huge, and as sharp-looking as the most lethal knives in Loki's armory. It didn't really look like a hawk--more like an eagle, maybe, but still not any eagle Bucky had ever seen--but it was watching them like one.

"What do you think that thing eats?" Bucky hissed. 

"Creatures smaller than us, surely," Loki hissed back. "Though if it believes us a threat to its territory, it may still attack."

Bucky had seen birds snatch up rabbits that were about their size compared to this bird, comparatively speaking. The ratios seemed about right, even if he had a fairly strong feeling that they were a lot more likely to get mauled than outright eaten. "Or maybe it thinks we're lunch. Its first lunch ever. Who could pass us up?"

"And you call me the pessimist."

"Think you're too good to get eaten, huh?"

"Merely too clever."

"Why don't you clever us out of this then?"

"I am _working on it_ ," Loki said, or, rather, hissed, the way they both had through this whole conversation, since the bird didn't seem to care if they whispered at each other, but might have decided it did care after all if they'd started raising their voices.

"Well, work faster," said Bucky. "What've you got so far?"

Of course there was always a danger in talking about your plans in Narnia when you were near anything more sentient than a rock and weren't sure whether or not it could understand you. But in this case there was also no helping it, outside of trying to remember that sign language they'd made up when they were kids (they'd kept forgetting to practice at home and eventually given up on it).

"Either we kill it, or we flee from it," Loki said.

"Why would we want to kill it?"

"If there were no guardian to be concerned with, everything in this place would be ours for the taking."

There shouldn't have been anything tempting about that, but just as Loki said it, Bucky got another whiff of those apples, stronger than before. For just a second, he could have gone along, just like he'd gone along the night before. But then he heard the wheedling tone in Loki's voice, and saw the greedy look in his eyes. It was like a slap in the face, the first shock of jumping into freezing cold water; it was the complete opposite of the way Loki had looked when he'd offered Bucky that other apple.

"Nah," said Bucky, who'd long ago grown an instinct about pushing back at Loki when he got like that, no matter what Bucky himself might have been tempted to do otherwise. "Let's get out of here."

Something passed over Loki's face. Something a lot nastier than usual, and not all that unlike the way he looked sometimes when he was talking about Thor. One difference was that this time it was aimed right at Bucky. The other difference, compared to the other flashes that came across Loki's face at times, was that this stayed there for a few seconds longer than the others usually did.

But then, just as Bucky was fixing to say that he was going, and so was Loki, and he'd drag him out if he had to, the expression on Loki's face changed. It wasn't the usual fading. This was more like a breaking. Whatever it was, though, it was gone, and left Loki standing across from Bucky (they'd both jumped to their feet due to the tenseness of it all), blinking at him and looking a little confused.

"We need to go," Bucky said again.

"--All right," Loki said, and gave his head a little shake.

*

Their escape didn't end up being anything flashy. It didn't even involve any magic. They gathered up the bedrolls , which Loki promptly disappeared, then inched toward the closest side of the wall--walking backwards sometimes and sideways at other times, so they'd see the bird the second it came out of the tree, and have that much more time to turn around and run like hell.

After what seemed like an hour, or maybe two, Bucky found out they'd made it to the wall by virtue of bumping into it, so that it pricked at him through the back of his shirt.

They looked at each other.

"Ready?" Bucky asked.

"I suppose."

They glanced back at the bird one last time. It was still sitting there, perched on a branch at the top of the tree. It was still watching them, with the same steady, unnerving yellow gaze it had watched them with the whole time. 

Together, they turned back to the wall, and started to climb. There wasn't any point in looking back now. Even if there had been, Bucky knew he needed to focus on what he was doing so he wouldn't fall down.

Loki got to the top first, like he always did, and reached down to offer Bucky his hand, which he also usually did. Together again, they swung over the top, and jumped, hitting the ground with respective oofs (Bucky's oof was louder than Loki's, and his recovery from the landing not quite as fast). Then Loki dashed down the hill, and Bucky followed at full speed. This was far more dangerous an undertaking than the climb itself had been, for the hill was steep indeed, and all it would have taken was missing one step to not have to take any more steps to get to the bottom. Bucky spent the first few seconds praying he wouldn't trip and break his ankle and a few ribs and also his neck--but then he forgot about that, and spent the rest of the way down flying. (This was likely for the best, as the more you question yourself when you're going very, very fast down a very steep slope and dare not slow down, the more likely you truly are to stumble.)

He hit the bottom of the hill just behind Loki. They passed the lake, and then they were heading up again, though on a much gentler slope this time. They kept going, Bucky pushing himself as hard as he could to try to keep up, until they reached the first trees. Then, when they were in the shadows and there were bushes to duck behind, they did, and for the first time looked back at the hill.

Between them and the top of the hill, there was nothing. No bird in the air, no bird on top of the wall, no sign that it had even thought to come after them. It was probably still sitting in that tree, though there was no way to be sure of that, since they couldn't really see anything inside the garden from this angle. 

What they could see, however, was the gate, which was very tall and even more solemn-looking, and made out of shining gold.

"Huh," Bucky said. "Was that there before?"

"--Surely not. We'd have noticed."

"Huh," Bucky said again. He got up again, just long enough to find a tree to sit back against. It was a pretty wide tree, and Loki plopped down right beside him, both of them radiating heat from their run. "We're not going back. Don't even think about it."

"I wasn't," Loki said, and when Bucky looked at him to see if that was true, Loki wasn't looking at the gate, or even at the garden at the top of the hill at all, but was grinning at Bucky. Not smiling, or any of his other pleased looks that could have signaled that he was doing something sneaky. It was just a grin, loud and surprising on his also surprisingly flushed face. 

Bucky couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Loki look like that. Maybe the time they'd outrun an entire pack of wolves (not Talking wolves, but starving ones, which might have been how they'd managed to outpace them in the first place--or maybe it had had more to do with the confusion spell Loki had had to cast a couple of times before he managed to hit them with it).

"What?" Bucky said, grinning back, partly out of adrenaline, and partly because you can't have a friend look at you like that and not look the same way back at them. "Do I have something on my face?"

"Nothing worse than the usual." Loki's grin faded, but he was still flushed and so happy looking that Bucky had another one of those moments where he couldn't help but stare. Then something else flashed over Loki's face as he looked back at the garden, a calculation so brief there was no telling what it was related to. Then he said, words tumbling out in a rush, "Certainly nothing that will frighten your fellow soldiers when you go off to war."

With a jolt, Bucky realized he hadn't even thought about that today, and not for most of yesterday, either. He'd been happy not thinking about it. Loki had seemed fine not bringing it up, too. So why was he doing it now?

Before Bucky could ask, or even get annoyed about it, Loki continued, with an expression Bucky didn't recognize, except that it seemed to be in the same family as most of his slyer ones, but somehow friendlier than most of those:

"I suppose you'll forget all about me, when you're surrounded by the warriors of your own world."

"Huh?" said Bucky, who had never for a second been in danger of forgetting the weirdest, most memorable person he'd ever known in his life. "What are you talking about? I'm not going to forget you just because I joined the Army."

"You will," Loki said, apparently not in the mood to pay attention to things like facts, or logic, or twenty years of friendship. "You'll do everything with them. You'll fight with them, drink with them, wench with them. When you return, you won't have the time or patience for anyone else you once knew."

By now Bucky's head was spinning. Loki had that result sometimes. He'd be trying to get at something, but come at it from such a weird direction that you wouldn't have a hope of following his thought process until he got to the end. "Do you really think I'm like that? Where are you getting this stuff?"

He stood up, feeling like he'd think better on his feet, and with enough distance that it would be easier to see what Loki's face was doing. But Loki got up too, and then he and his breath were right in Bucky's face, and Bucky's back was pressed into the rough bark of the tree, and Loki was still talking. "Unless, I suppose, I were to _make_ myself memorable. Somehow. Would you like that?"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"You do, don't you?" Loki asked, in a way that seemed like he was talking to himself more than to Bucky. "No, I'm certain you do. It's obvious. But--don't you?"

Before Bucky could say anything, much less come close to parsing any of that, Loki had crowded him even more firmly into the tree. Then he leaned in, and pressed his lips to Bucky's, and for a second all Bucky could think was that he'd always thought Loki's lips would be sharp. But they were just as soft as anyone else's, and a little cool, and it took Bucky so long to think of how to respond that Loki was pulling away before he could respond at all.

Now that Bucky had caught up--a little--enough to figure out that whatever Loki had been going on about, this was what he'd been trying to get at--he couldn't have missed the hurt that flashed over Loki's face as he started to retreat. That expression was exactly what Bucky's chest would have done, if he'd been the one to kiss Loki, and Loki hadn't wanted it. 

And, here was the thing. Bucky had known for a long time that nothing was going to happen between them. He'd known it for years, known it for as long as he'd known he was as gone on Loki as it was probably possible to be gone on anyone. The only thing he'd been as sure of as his own feelings was that there was no point in acting on them, because there was no way Loki felt the same way.

In the end, seeing the hurt on Loki's face, Bucky didn't have any time to do anything like think, nevermind process. There wasn't anything for it, there was nothing he could do; there was only one thing he could do.

Bucky grabbed Loki by his shirt, and pulled him forward, and kissed him back.

For a second, Loki felt tense against him, but even without being in a position to see whatever expression had flashed over his face, Bucky was sure he wasn't mad, just unsure. But the tension passed as fast as the flashes usually did, and then Loki was pressed up against Bucky again, kissing him a lot less carefully than he had the first time, until they were both panting, and Bucky, at least, was already starting to get hard.

"So, when you said all that dumb shit," he said a minute later, when Loki was busy sucking on his neck. "You were just trying to get into my pants?"

"Was some part of that ambiguous?"

Pretty much all of it, Bucky thought. He'd always gotten the impression that Loki was a smooth talker, back in his own world. Bucky was decent enough, but he'd figured Loki was better. But now he knew otherwise, and that was better, because it was real, somehow.

However smooth Loki wasn't, he was a good kisser. A _great_ kisser. And before Bucky could say anything, Loki was kissing him again, his long, lithe body pressed against him. Bucky knew what Loki's body looked like, but now he knew what it felt like, with Loki moving everything against him. One of Loki's hands was up under his shirt, rubbing against his nipple. Bucky was all the way hard now, and it would have been embarrassing, except that one of the things Loki was moving was his hips, and Bucky could feel him too, big and just as hard as Bucky was, their erections rubbing together through too many layers of clothing.

They could have kept going like that, and Bucky probably would have come. Loki was touching him, the way he'd always tried not to think about Loki touching him (for even after he'd understood what he felt toward Loki, thinking about it in this much detail had seemed like a betrayal--or worse, something Loki would see on his face the next time they met), and it didn't matter how many times he'd gotten lucky since that first time with Sally Henderson; he'd never been with Loki, and that was the part that mattered.

Then Loki's hand went to the waist of Bucky's trousers. His fingertips dipped beneath the band, stroking softly. 

"I could," he said, his breath warming Bucky's ear, and his lips tickling...and maybe he was a smooth talker after all, because for a second or two, all Bucky could see was stars.

"Yeah," Bucky said. He wasn't sure what Loki wanted to do, but it didn't matter. He'd heard some things about what two guys could get up to together, and imagined plenty of others--and even if he hadn't done any of them (at least not with another man), there wasn't a single one that he wouldn't be willing to try with Loki.

Loki unfastened the front of Bucky's trousers (his fingers worked smoothly, too, like he was getting more composed the more Bucky shook), and he sank down to the ground in front of him, pulling Bucky's trousers down as he went.

For a second, Bucky looked away, not because he wasn't dying to see this, but because if he didn't, he was going to come before Loki could even touch him. 

Maybe, if he'd closed his eyes, they could at least have finished with this part--but he kept them open, and that was how he saw the tall pale figure on the hill, and that was why he said, "What's that?"

"What's what?" Loki said, irritation clouding the greed (much nicer than most of the other greeds Bucky had seen on his face) that had been on his face before now. But he must have picked up on Bucky's alarm, because he turned around and looked. "--Oh."

By the time Bucky had gotten his pants back up, Loki was on his feet, with knives in his hands. 

Slowly, they crouched behind a bush, and watched what was going on on the hill. The figure Bucky had seen walked up to the gate, and looked at it for a minute or two. Then it started walking again, and went around the corner.

"That who I think it is?" Bucky asked. He didn't really need to; he'd have known her anywhere.

"The Witch," Loki confirmed. "But what can she be doing here?"

"Dunno." They had never managed to pick up very much Narnian history. There was never really that kind of time. Pretty often, there wasn't even much time for them to catch up with each other. But from what they had picked up in bits and pieces here and there, Bucky knew that the long winter had started a long, long time from now. Or was going to start a really long time from now. It was hundreds, maybe thousands of years away.

They moved forward, a coordinated creep they didn't even have to have a conversation about, they'd done it so many times before. Then the Witch reached out her hands to touch the wall, and then began to climb it.

"Those apples," Loki said suddenly. "She shouldn't have them."

"Right. So we have to stop her."

"And die in the effort?" said Loki, and it would have been hard to say whether he was seriously objecting or not, except when Bucky glanced at his face, it was pale and solemn.

"If we could stop her now, maybe the rest wouldn't have to happen." Something in Bucky's chest began to swell with how it would be the right thing to do, maybe the only right thing to do. If he was going to go to Europe and be a part of a pain and suffering he might never know the outcome of, maybe he could go there knowing that here, in another world, some other pain and suffering had never had to happen at all.

"Or perhaps she'll kill us here and now, and our deaths will somehow cause her to commit her later deeds," said Loki.

"Yeah, but we should try. It's got to be why we're here."

"Did you somehow _miss_ the entire magical garden we planted? Or did it simply not occur to you that that could have been our purpose this time?"

But Bucky wasn't about to get dragged into a stupid, petty argument. Besides: he knew the resigned note in Loki's voice, and knew that when push came to shove, Loki would go along.

"We should probably come up with a plan," he said.

The whispered argument on this subject had barely started when a voice said, "There is no need for that."

It wasn't the Witch's voice, not by far. It was the opposite, low and deep and powerful. If you had ever heard the song that made that world, you would have known the voice and the song must have come from the same throat. Even if he hadn't heard that voice a hundred other times, Bucky would have known that much. 

When they turned around to see who had spoken, of course it was Aslan standing there, somehow as golden in the shade as he would have been in the light. 

But they could only look for a moment, before Loki's hand brushed Bucky's arm, and they both looked back toward the garden.

"Your instincts are good, but you need not fear to turn your back to the Witch when you are with me," Aslan said. "Walk with me."

*

They walked, though to the south instead of to the east, so that they were walking parallel to the garden rather than away from it. Aslan was in the middle, with Bucky on the side closer to the garden, and Loki on the side closer to the forest.

"What are we supposed to do?" Bucky asked, some part of him having trouble with the idea that if Aslan was there, they were probably about to get sent home.

"About the Witch?" Aslan seemed to growl, a low and thoughtful sound. "You need do nothing further regarding the Witch. All will proceed as is intended. It has begun already."

"Is there anything else we're supposed to do?"

"Why do you think there should be more for you to do?" Aslan asked. If he'd been talking to Loki, Bucky would have been sure there was humor in his voice, like Aslan was enjoying him. It was harder to say when Aslan was talking to you that way, though. 

"It's just," Bucky said, and wanted to say, selfishly, that they really did need more time this time. That he needed more time here with Loki before he had to ship out. But that wasn't the most important thing, and so he swallowed it down and said, instead, "Things are going to be really bad, for a lot of people. If the Witch doesn't get stopped. And we're here, now, before she can do anything. So we could--stop her, or slow her down. We could do something that really matters."

"Everything you have ever done matters, whether it was done in your own world or in mine," Aslan said, and there was no doubt that he was being very serious and solemn now. Bucky was shocked to see his eyes were shining with tears. "But you are not wrong, O Bucky Barnes. There is much pain yet to come--here in my land of Narnia, but also in your own world. It is pain you each must bear alone, for you will live many years before you return herh."

Loki made a sound, not exactly a word, not anything close to a question.

"Yes?" Aslan said, somehow very gently. "What was that?"

"Will it work?" Loki said. "The apple?"

Aslan usually seemed to be laughing when he talked to Loki, but he wasn't laughing now. "That is a very bold question--or have you yet told your friend the purpose of the apple you gave him?"

"I _knew_ it," Bucky said, though truthfully he'd almost completely forgotten about eating the apple in the first place, considering how much had happened this morning.

"You have committed a great wrong twice over," Aslan said, still to Loki. "You stole the apple from the Lady Frigga, and you were untruthful when you offered it to Bucky."

"I didn't lie," Loki said, and it was hard to say which of them he was saying it to.

"No--but you of all know well there is little need to _speak_ a lie when you wish to deceive," said Aslan.

"But did it _work_?" Loki asked again, which was surprising, since he usually stopped running his mouth pretty early on when Aslan didn't approve of something he'd done.

"Such a fruit would have killed him in your own world," said Aslan. "Eaten here, it will do as you intended it to do--but not without cost. There may come a day when you wish you had never given Bucky that apple, and Bucky that he had never eaten of it." 

That gloomy thought hung there for a long second, as all sorts of questions rose up in Bucky's mind, all of them fighting for the chance to be the first one he asked. But the one he would probably have asked, if he'd had the time to find the words, would have been how much harm he'd done by planting that apple in the first place.

In the end, Loki beat him to it, not with a question but with a statement: "I won't regret it. Now, or ever."

On his face was an expression Bucky had only ever seen in passing. But this was stubborn, set in stone instead of sand, unwilling to be brushed away like pretty much every other big feeling Loki had ever had. It was defiance, in Loki's eyes and the set of his mouth and the way he was standing.

"There is no need to worry about it overmuch today," Aslan said, not seeming angry at being defied, or amused about it, or anything. He seemed sad, still. Sorrow seemed to be soaking into everything around them, so that the trees were sad and the shadows were sad and the sky might start crying any minute from now, even though there wasn't a cloud to be seen in it.

Aslan turned his head toward the garden. Bucky looked, too. Something was landing on the hill, not too far from the golden gate itself. Something big, and really oddly shaped. Then a couple parts of it slid to the ground, and Bucky saw that it wasn't some kind of weird monster, but a boy and a girl and a winged horse.

Aslan turned to Bucky. His eyes were knowing, as if he'd seen the horror that was inside Bucky, or even how most of it was part of the same old horror he felt every time he thought about what the Witch had done in Narnia, and how long it had lasted. Gently, he said, "You did no wrong by planting the tree. Yes, the Witch even now gains much strength from the fruit she has plucked off its branches--yet because she has eaten of that stolen fruit, Narnia will have a protection in place that could not have been sown otherwise. She will not be able to return to Narnia today, nor tomorrow. She will not be permitted to go back while my people, the first people, are young and unknowing, not even one of them as worldly as the Centaur you met yesterday. She will not go back until she can be survived."

"About that Centaur," Loki said.

Aslan seemed nearly to sigh, or at least let out a long, soft breath. He must have been tired or in some kind of hurry, because he didn't bother to tease Loki, or ask him what he meant, or even give a lecture on how unimportant statues really were, in the scheme of things. "I would not worry overmuch about what the stars fail to see," he said. "They were never meant to see you, any more than you are meant to look down and see your own beating heart. I have brought you to Narnia for a purpose. Not in the service of any prophecy, but in the service of the slightest thread of hope. We will speak on this matter again, but not now."

After this, there didn't seem to be much else to say, other than the obvious question of who the kids and the horse were. But Bucky had a strong sense, from a long history of one or the other of them being told that something was none of their business, that this wasn't a question he was going to get an answer to. At least not right here and now.

But there was another question, just as obvious.

"Are you going to send us home now?" Bucky asked, because someone needed to, and sometimes you just had to grit your teeth and get on with it.

"Not yet," said Aslan. "You may have one more day--and far from here, so that there will be no need to concern yourself with the Witch. (In fact, you are finished with your work involving the Witch.)"

That was all the warning they got before Aslan lowered his head, and seemed to growl, and in the growl there was a wind, a warm breeze, gentle but firm, that swept over them. 

Bucky closed his eyes against it, and when he opened them again, he was somewhere else. There was sand beneath his feet, whiter and finer than any sand he'd ever seen. Waves lathed against the shore, a low and soothing sound that would come back to him night after night, helping to lull him to sleep in the kind of circumstances where it was surprising anybody ever got any sleep. A little ways inland there was a forest, and between the forest and the beach there was tall grass, waving slowly in that same warm, gentle breeze.

Bucky was there, and Loki was there with him, the way Loki was always with him, when they were here; the way Bucky wished he could be all the time (but so secretly and so quietly he barely recognized it as what it was most of the time--for the man tended to dwell no more than the boy had).

*

"So what was in that apple, anyway?" Bucky asked. Some part of him was surprised he hadn't asked Aslan while they'd had him, but a greater part knew, and must have known even then, that there was only one person he wanted to hear this from.

"You were the one who insisted on entering a war that would tear you apart. Since I cannot be with you, I had little other choice," Loki said, then saw whatever was on Bucky's face, and sighed dramatically. "If you insist. Long ago, my mother's apples were fed to certain warriors among our people, to make it less likely that they should fall in battle--and grant them a longer life outside of battle, as well."

So the apple would make Bucky harder to kill, and help him live longer. That seemed simple. It seemed like something he should feel pretty happy about.

"Why didn't you just tell me that?" he asked, not sure what he felt about this, if he felt anything about this.

"The apples are spelled against theft. They will do nothing for a thief, or the one who sent the thief. The only way it could have worked is if you didn't know the apple's purpose."

"Oh," Bucky said.

"So I really couldn't tell you until you _had_ eaten it. Even then, it might not have done as I wished it to do--not all spells allow for such loopholes. My mother's spells least of all. But it seems this one did."

"Okay," Bucky said.

"'Oh'," Loki repeated. "'Okay.' Don't you have anything else to say?"

"Dunno. What do you want me to say?"

"You could start with 'thank you ever so much, Loki. You saved my foolish mortal skin. I shall owe you an enormous debt going forward.'"

For some reason, that was what made Bucky feel something. He laughed, feeling a little hysterical, and with no idea how obvious the hysteria might or might not be to Loki. "No way."

"Ungrateful," Loki muttered, and then: "You could ask questions. If you have any. I'll answer them. Fully, even."

Bucky thought about it. "Nah."

"Really? You don't want to know anything?"

The thing about it was, Bucky felt like he knew so much, almost too much. Why Loki had wanted him to eat the apple so bad; why he'd been so happy when Bucky had done it. That Loki had guessed how Bucky felt about him, because no matter how hard he'd had to try it, Loki knew him at least as well as the other way around. It was a knowledge that filled him up, with joy and sorrow and even more confusion than he would already have been dealing with anyway. He'd never planned to be here. He'd never been going to do this. And now here he was. Here they were, alone, on a beautiful shore of what he figured was probably an equally beautiful island. Here they were, and they had the rest of the day with nothing else they had to do.

In the end, Bucky wasn't really sure what he wanted to do with this gift (for there was no denying that that was what it was). But one thing he knew he didn't want to do was to interrogate Loki about details that would only mean something to the trained sorcerer Bucky wasn't.

"What do you want to do?" he said, instead of any of the other things he could have said.

Loki blinked, but recovered quickly. "We could explore. Or...the grass looks comfortable." He inched closer to Bucky, until his breath was warm on the side of Bucky's face, and his lips lightly brushed his ear again. "We could finish what we started. I was about to give you something to remember me by, before we were interrupted."

The grass really did look comfortable. Bucky could picture it, what laying down together would be like. Loki's long, lithe body pressed against him, neither of them with their clothes on. Doing all the things Bucky had heard of or just imagined (or done with people with a different configuration than Loki). They'd be able to fit so much into the rest of the day. Bucky wanted it. He wanted it even more than he'd wanted it with his back to a tree and Loki dropping on his knees.

But through all the confusion and everything that had happened in the last day, there was something he was suddenly sure he wanted more. 

He turned his head and kissed Loki again, hard, trying to fit everything he felt for him into a few seconds. Then he pulled away and said, "It's not that I don't want to. But I think I'd rather spend the rest of today with my friend." 

He peered at Loki's face, hoping he'd get what Bucky was saying, instead of any of the other possibilities. But all Loki did was kiss him again, just as fiercely as Bucky had kissed him. Then he said, "I'll have to have a raincheck on it, then."

"You got it," Bucky said, grinning partly from relief, and partly because it was always incredibly amusing to hear Loki use expressions he'd picked up from Bucky. Somehow, it was even funnier when he got the context right than when he didn't. "So, what should we do?"

But Loki was already moving away, already raising his hands to work some spell or other. Targets appeared up and down the beach. A crossbow appeared in Loki's hands, which he shoved into Bucky's as soon as he caught up.

"What," Bucky started, but Loki, suddenly businesslike, didn't even let him ask the question.

"When you report to your commander, you're to tell him you're slightly less hopeless with a crossbow than with any other weapon."

"Sure," Bucky said, his chest swelling again with everything he felt for Loki, and with the newly-examined knowledge of everything Loki must feel for him. It was enough that he figured there was no need to tell Loki there weren't likely to be any crossbows available when he got to the Army. Now couldn't be the time to clue Loki in on guns or tanks or trenches or bombs.

Besides, Bucky was actually really good with crossbows, and not only that, he enjoyed shooting them. Running drills for the rest of the day didn't exactly sound like a hardship.

And in the end, it really wasn't.


End file.
